Staff Software Engineer - Backend, Core Services

Team Nextdoor Nextdoor is where you connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you so you can belong. Our purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on. Neighbors around the world turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, get things done, and build real-world connections with those nearby - neighbors, businesses, and public services. Today, neighbors rely on Nextdoor in more than 315,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries. Meet Your Future Neighbors At Nextdoor, the Core Services team is responsible for operating critical high throughput services which power the communities on the Nextdoor platform worldwide. We operate the core datastores and critical services, most recently building a distributed, multi-tiered distributed cache with zone aware routing in Golang making use of Istio's Locality aware routing to serve 20M QPS. Other recent projects include introducing Strimzi to deploy Kafka and building a kubernetes native postgres connection pooler. At Nextdoor, we offer a warm and inclusive work environment that embraces a hybrid employment experience, providing a flexible experience for our valued employees. The Impact You'll Make As a member of this team, you'll work in a large-scale distributed system environment, identifying high leverage opportunities to increase Nextdoor's performance, scalability, and resilience. As a team, we focus on extracting performance critical components into highly optimized horizontal components which provide leverage for all Nextdoor's product engineers. The primary focus of the team is an iterative investment in a distributed, globally replicated graph store with high availability tiered caching. This datastore will provide predictable performance and aims to enable product engineers to move quickly without thinking about RDBMS database performance/migrations and will enable a fundamental architectural shift at Nextdoor towards a globally available single distributed application. You'll work with product engineers to understand their pain points and identify high leverage opportunities to improve developer experience and scalability of our systems. Our goal is for the infrastructure to do the heavy lifting so that our product engineers can spend every minute of their time focused on their product areas and metrics. You will participate in in-person Nextdoor events, trainings, off-sites, volunteer days, and other team building exercises; You will also build in-person relationships with team members and contribute to the KIND culture that Nextdoor values. What You'll Bring To The Team 5 Years of experience in a high performance distributed systems engineering environment, preferably working closely scaling databases and caches to support fast social product growth, and/or the ability to perform at an advanced level in the domain Expertise in operating or building distributed datastores, a deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals and expertise in a language such as Golang, Rust, C++, Java, or Python Creative, empathetic collaboration and optimism to solve difficult problems in an environment without known solutions Experience with Kubernetes, Istio and other container orchestration primitives beneficial Rewards Compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition programs at Nextdoor come together to create one overall rewards package. The starting salary for this role is expected to range from $210,000 - $265,000 on an annualized basis, or potentially greater in the event that your 'level' of proficiency exceeds the level expected for the role. Compensation may also vary by geography. We also expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role. With equal quarterly vesting, your first vest date would be within the first 3 months of your start date. Overall, total compensation will vary depending on your relevant skills, experience, and qualifications. We have you covered Nextdoor employees can choose between a variety of great health plans. We cover 100% of your personal monthly premium for health, dental, and vision - and provide a OneMedical membership for concierge care. At Nextdoor, we empower our employees to build stronger local communities. To create a platform where all feel welcome, we want our workforce to reflect the diversity of the neighbors we seek to serve. We encourage everyone interested in our purpose to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or any other trait that unfairly targets a group of people. In accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we always consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. For information about our collection and use of applicants' personal information, please see Nextdoor's Personnel Privacy Notice, found here.