Staff Software Engineer, Event Streaming Systems

Our Global Structure Deliveroo is now part of DoorDash, bringing together teams with even greater reach, scale, and ambition. Depending on your role, you may collaborate with teammates, systems, and leaders across DoorDash and Wolt. Together, we’re unlocking new possibilities as one global team. Join us in our mission to transform the way people shop and eat, where impact, innovation and growth drive everything we do. Our Engineering teams tackle complex technical challenges across a global, three-sided marketplace, building and scaling systems that serve millions of customers, riders and merchants every day. From real-time logistics to resilient infrastructure and marketplace optimisation, we design, build and operate technology that powers Deliveroo’s (& Doordash’s) growth at scale. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Event Streaming Systems team. This is a hybrid role. In this role, you’ll provide technical leadership for the event streaming infrastructure that powers business-critical workflows across Deliveroo, DoorDash and Wolt. You’ll help define the long-term direction of our messaging and streaming platforms, lead high-impact technical initiatives across teams, and raise the reliability, scalability and operational excellence bar for Tier-0 infrastructure. What You’ll Be Doing You’ll be joining the Event Streaming Systems team within the broader Storage organisation. The team builds and operates highly reliable, scalable and efficient event streaming infrastructure, including Kafka, Event Streaming abstractions (internally called EventBus), messaging platform capabilities, and future streaming technologies. The team also partners closely with Database Reliability, Storage, SRE, Data Platform and Core Infrastructure teams to ensure our most critical data and messaging systems remain reliable, operable and cost-efficient at global scale. These systems support Tier-0 workflows and are foundational to how engineering teams build reliable, event-driven products at scale. Here’s what your day-to-day might look like: • Define and drive the technical vision and roadmap for our event streaming and messaging platforms, balancing reliability, scalability, cost, operability and developer experience. • Lead team-level and cross-team initiatives for Kafka, EventBus and related streaming infrastructure, from ambiguous problem definition through architecture, delivery, rollout and adoption. • Act as a trusted technical advisor for Kafka, messaging, storage-adjacent and DBRE-related platform decisions across Deliveroo, DoorDash and Wolt. • Design durable, extensible systems and platform capabilities that can be leveraged by other engineers and teams, reducing duplicated effort and operational risk. • Lead the resolution of complex distributed systems problems, including reliability incidents, performance bottlenecks, capacity constraints, data-safety risks and production-operability gaps. • Raise the operational excellence bar for Tier-0 infrastructure through observability, automation, incident response, runbooks, operational readiness and continuous improvement. • Proactively build alignment with partner teams, including EventBus, Storage, DBRE, SRE, Data Platform and Core Infrastructure, shaping joint goals and mitigating cross-org delivery risks. • Mentor and grow engineers through technical guidance, design, feedback, code review, incident review facilitation and knowledge-sharing across the engineering community. • Evaluate emerging streaming, storage and automation technologies, including AI-enabled operational tooling where appropriate, and champion pragmatic adoption where they can materially improve quality, velocity or efficiency. What You’ll Need to Thrive Our ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in several of these areas and the judgment to lead others through ambiguity: • Significant experience building, operating and evolving distributed systems in production, ideally for platform or infrastructure teams supporting critical workloads. • Deep hands-on experience with Kafka or comparable event streaming systems as a platform, infrastructure service or business-critical production dependency. • Strong technical leadership skills, with a track record of defining technical direction, shaping roadmaps and leading multi-engineer or cross-team initiatives. • Ability to make and own technical decisions in ambiguous situations, using data, operational signals, customer needs and long-term system health to guide tradeoffs. • Strong coding ability in Java, Go, Python or similar languages, with a focus on reliable, maintainable, observable and scalable production systems. • Experience improving production reliability through automation, observability, capacity management, incident response, operational readiness and sustainable on-call practices. • Strong distributed systems fundamentals, including Linux, networking, storage, JVM-based systems, fault tolerance, backpressure, capacity planning and performance tuning. • A force-multiplier mindset: you create leverage through reusable technical foundations, clear documentation, strong engineering practices, mentoring and removing single points of failure. • Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence platform, infrastructure, product and reliability teams without relying on authority. Nice to have • Experience contributing to Kafka or related open source distributed systems. • Experience with Redpanda, WarpStream, AutoMQ, Pulsar or similar streaming technologies. • Experience with JVM tuning, diskless streaming architectures or multi-region event streaming platforms. • Experience operating Tier-0 infrastructure at large scale, including incident leadership and post-incident improvement programs. • Experience with database reliability, storage systems, data platforms or DBRE practices in addition to event streaming. • Experience using automation