Staff Engineer

The Storage Layer Services team is currently re-architecting the MongoDB Cloud Storage Layer. This is a relatively new team in MongoDB that sits at the heart of the next generation MongoDB Cloud Storage Architecture, and the team is working to build performant multi-tenant distributed storage services both to enhanc...

Engineering at MongoDB is globally distributed, with a mix of folks being fully remote, hybrid, or in-office. We have a small but growing team that calls Sydney home, and we are looking for a Staff Engineer to join the team working closely with other teams in Sydney and North America.

Our team champions a strong culture of inclusivity, diversity, and collaboration. If you want to work on a collaborative team that applies great engineering fundamentals to deliver core features of a popular database, join us! Let’s change what’s possible for application developers, system architects, and database o...

You have 10+ years of experience in programming, debugging, and performance tuning highly concurrent and/or distributed systems. Especially if you have worked in a systems language (C, C++, Rust, etc) for a number of those years
You have a track record as an effective technical leader. You love helping teams be successful at solving vaguely defined problems in iterative and measurable ways. You put the customer first, and don’t hesitate to cross team boundaries in search of the right solution
You have a solid grasp of related systems fundamentals, such as cache management, log-based recovery, transactions or performance profiling
You’re comfortable reasoning about highly concurrent, asynchronous services — backpressure, tail latency, and the failure modes of replicated state machines
You’ve worked on large, highly available, scalable and performant systems such as databases, high frequency trading platforms, cloud storage services, or maybe even Mars rovers
You have excellent verbal and written technical communication skills; you enjoy collaborating with colleagues and mentoring junior engineers
You enjoy learning new things in the domains of computer science and software engineering
Be directly responsible for delivering on goals which span a 6-18 month timeframe
Play a key role in defining the roadmap for the next 12 months
Write well tested, production-ready code in rust
Act as a force multiplier across the organization, drive improvements to processes and tools to help us more confidently make sound decisions and  changes to high risk parts of our codebase
Use our observability stack to inform decisions and measure the impact of work the team ships
Investigate performance regressions and guide the team through making complex changes that have to balance performance against other requirements
Champion a culture of operational excellence, and be part of a one-week-in-6 on-call rotation
Help cultivate a strong talent bench through interviewing, mentoring and knowledge sharing
Develop, maintain and apply expertise on cutting edge database and distributed systems research from industry and academia
Handle (or lead the effort to handle) time-sensitive customer escalations
Propose and advocate for high-impact projects across teams, connecting customer needs and company goals to a clear technical strategy for large initiatives
Drive consensus on abstract, complex issues affecting multiple teams by framing tradeoffs, engaging stakeholders, and guiding decisions to durable outcomes
Be open to occasional (once a year) travel to the US
In the first month:
You have understood the high level architecture of SLS and fixed a few bugs
You are starting to develop relationships with key stakeholders across your VPs organisation
In three months:
You have diagnosed and fixed a few customer or testing-reported issues
You have contributed to the development of SLS and shipped your first feature to production
You are starting to take on code review responsibilities and are involved in reviewing the design for new features
In six months:
You have started mentoring other engineers on the team
You are leading the development of a new feature
You are beginning to involve yourself in planning and roadmapping efforts
In twelve months:
You have successfully shipped multiple major contributions
You own a department level goal