Staff Engineer, Storage Layer – Hybrid – Sydney

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 enhance our existing MongoDB cloud storage architecture and to power more of our customers' use cases more efficiently.

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!

We are looking to speak to candidates who are based in Sydney for our hybrid working model.

You’re an ideal candidate if:

• 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, 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.

As a Staff Engineer on the Storage Layer Services team you will:

• 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, driving improvements to processes and tools.
• 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.
• 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 time-sensitive customer escalations.
• Propose and advocate for high-impact projects across teams.
• Drive consensus on abstract, complex issues affecting multiple teams.
• Be open to occasional travel to the US.

Success Measures:

• In the first month: Understand the high level architecture of SLS and fix a few bugs; develop relationships with key stakeholders.
• In three months: Diagnose and fix a few customer or testing-reported issues; contribute to the development of SLS and ship your first feature to production.
• In six months: Start mentoring other engineers; lead the development of a new feature.
• In twelve months: Successfully ship multiple major contributions; own a department level goal.

Benefits:

• 5 weeks annual leave.
• 22 weeks paid parental leave for both parents covering childbirth, adoption, surrogacy and fostering.
• Family forming assistance covering fertility care, adoption and surrogacy.
• Subsidised health & dental insurance for you and your dependents.
• Classpass credits, a Headspace subscription and Vaccination vouchers as part of our broader health and wellness programs.
• In-office Lunch up to 3 days per week.

MongoDB is built for change, empowering our customers and our people to innovate at the speed of the market. We have redefined the data platform for the AI era, enabling builders to create, transform, and disrupt industries with software. MongoDB’s unified data platform helps organizations modernize legacy workloads, embrace innovation, and unleash AI.

Our compass at MongoDB is our Leadership Commitment, guiding how and why we make decisions, show up for each other, and win. It’s what makes us MongoDB. To drive the personal growth and business impact of our employees, we’re committed to developing a supportive and enriching culture for everyone.

MongoDB is committed to providing any necessary accommodations for individuals with disabilities within our application and interview process. To request an accommodation due to a disability, please inform your recruiter. MongoDB is an equal opportunities employer.