Staff Software Engineer - Database Engine Internals

At Lyft, our purpose is to serve and connect. We aim to achieve this by cultivating a work environment where all team members belong and have the opportunity to thrive. The Luxury team builds rich and creative features that set the standard for the ride sharing industry. We are looking for a motivated staff engineer to join us building app experiences, UIs, and infrastructure for Black, Black SUV, and other upmarket modes for which quality is uncompromising. Ownership is a key quality for this team; you should be driven to track a project to successful completion and beyond, taking initiative to work with other teams and functions to ensure the code you write reaches users and drives impact. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will act as a critical technical leader across backend, frontend, iOS, and Android, taking holistic ownership of complex systems, defining strategic roadmaps, driving cross-functional alignment and engineering excellence to improve the luxury experience. You'll collaborate with engineering, product, data science, analytics, and operations on programs that empower us to iterate quickly, delighting our passengers and drivers.    RESPONSIBILITIES: * Shape the long-term architecture for full-stack systems, taking accountability for both short-term functionality and long-term health. * Translate high-level business goals into actionable engineering projects. Own the technical roadmap from conception to delivery, managing cross-team dependencies and mitigating risks. * Champion improvements in system, observability, performance, and tech debt reduction, extending your influence beyond your immediate team. * Establish best practices for deployment, alerting, and on-call health. Take holistic ownership of the platform's stability, tracking down issue root causes and building preventive safeguards for your immediate scope and beyond. * Drive alignment across product, design, and operations. Proactively resolve bottlenecks and make decisive trade-offs to protect system architecture from competing organizational priorities. * Mentor and level up the engineers around you. Delegate stretch opportunities, lead cross-team reviews, and foster a culture of strong technical excellence. * Serve as a dependable, high-bar interviewer and active participant in Lyft’s broader internal engineering community. EXPERIENCE: * 8+ years of software engineering industry experience, with a proven track record of technical leadership and system ownership.  * Experience developing mobile apps and can guide client-server and iOS/Android decision making. * Deep expertise in designing, debugging, and running fault-tolerant, highly available, large-scale distributed systems. * Demonstrated experience driving technical roadmaps, managing cross-team dependencies, and influencing system architecture at an organizational level. * Solid knowledge of distributed systems, relational databases, and NoSQL databases. * Experience working with public cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure) and modern container orchestration technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker, cri-o). * Ability to communicate complex technical trade-offs effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. BENEFITS: * Great medical, dental, and vision insurance options with additional programs available when enrolled * Mental health benefits * Family building benefits * Child care and pet benefits * 401(k) plan with company match to help save for your future * In addition to 12 observed holidays, salaried team members have discretionary paid time off, hourly team members have 15 days paid time off * 18 weeks of paid parental leave. Biological, adoptive, and foster parents are all eligible * Subsidized commuter benefits * Monthly Lyft credits and complimentary Lyft Pink membership Lyft is an equal opportunity employer committed to an inclusive workplace that fosters belonging. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regards to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, age, genetic information, or any other basis prohibited by law. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Lyft highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. This role will be in-office on a hybrid schedule — Team Members will be expected to work in the office 3 days per week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Lyft considers working in the office at least 3 days per week to be an essential function of this hybrid role. Your recruiter can share more information about the various in-office perks Lyft offers. Additionally, hybrid roles have the flexibility to work from anywhere for up to 4 weeks per year. #Hybrid The expected base pay range for this position in the San Francisco area is $176,000 - $220,000, not inclusive of potential equity offering, bonus or benefits. Salary ranges are dependent on a variety of factors, including qualifications, experience and geographic location. Your recruiter can share more information about the salary range specific to your working location and other factors during the hiring process.

About Pinterest: Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product. Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible. At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI. Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here. We're seeking an exceptional Staff Software Engineer to join our Observability team at Pinterest. This role combines deep technical expertise in distributed systems and data engineering with a product-oriented mindset to build world-class observability solutions that empower our engineering organization. As a Staff Engineer on the Observability team, you'll be responsible for designing and building the infrastructure and tools that provide visibility into Pinterest's large-scale distributed systems, helping thousands of engineers understand, debug, and optimize their services.   What you'll do: * Define and execute the observability roadmap, treating it as a product. Understand engineering team needs and translate them into technical solutions with measurable impact * Architect, build, and scale distributed observability infrastructure (metrics, logs, traces) to handle massive volumes across Pinterest's distributed systems * Build high-performance data pipelines and storage for real-time and historical telemetry analysis at Pinterest scale * Champion Best Practices: Establish observability standards and patterns across the organization, making it easy for teams to instrument their services and gain actionable insights * Technical Leadership: Mentor engineers, lead architectural reviews, and influence technical decisions across teams to improve overall system reliability and performance * Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner with SRE, Infrastructure, Product Engineering, and other teams to understand pain points and deliver solutions that improve developer productivity and system reliability * Innovation: Stay current with observability trends and technologies, evaluating and adopting cutting-edge tools and techniques to keep Pinterest at the forefront   What we’re looking for: * Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience * Product Mindset: Demonstrated ability to work backwards from customer needs —understanding user needs, prioritizing features, measuring success, and iterating based on feedback. Experience building internal platforms or tools with strong adoption * Distributed Systems Expertise: 7+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with deep understanding of consistency, availability, scalability, and failure modes * Data Engineering Skills: Strong background in building data pipelines, working with time-series databases, columnar storage, stream processing (Kafka, Flink, etc.), and data modeling at scale * Observability Domain Knowledge: Hands-on experience with modern observability tools and practices including metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling. Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar technologies * Programming Proficiency: Expert-level coding skills in languages like Java, Python, Go, or Scala with ability to write production-quality code * Systems Thinking: Ability to see the big picture while managing complex technical details, balancing trade-offs between cost, performance, and reliability * Experience building observability platforms from the ground up or significantly scaling existing solutions * Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and technologies (Kubernetes, service mesh, etc.) * Track record of driving adoption of internal platforms through excellent documentation, UX, and developer advocacy * Experience with machine learning or anomaly detection applied to observability use cases * Strong communication skills with ability to influence stakeholders at all levels * Contributions to open-source observability projects, a plus   In-Office Requirement Statement:  * We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection. * This role will need to be in the office for in-person collaboration 1-2 times/quarter and therefore can be situated anywhere in the country.    Relocation Statement: * This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.   #LI-REMOTE #LI-JT1 At Pinterest we believe the workplace should be equitable, inclusive, and inspiring for every employee. In an effort to provide greater transparency, we are sharing the base salary range for this position. The position is also eligible for equity. Final salary is based on a number of factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, or particular skills and expertise. Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here. US based applicants only $177,185—$364,795 USD Our Commitment to Inclusion: Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.   By submitting this application, I certify that all information submitted in my application and throughout the hiring process is true, accurate, and complete to the best of my knowledge. I understand that any false statement, omission, or misrepresentation may disqualify me from employment consideration or result in termination if discovered after hire.