Senior Staff Engineer Server Networking & Observability jobs at Mongodb in United States, Seattle

The MongoDB Product Security organization works with software engineers to design, implement, and operate systems in a manner that protects customer data. It is a multidisciplinary team that covers product, software, cloud, infrastructure, and operational security concerns. The team does the following:

• Build a developer driven security program where there is tight integration with engineering artifacts, process, and tooling
• Use software architecture and coding patterns to reduce the impact of security issues
• Be security subject matter experts for our tech stack and products

• You will take ownership, define strategy, and drive improvement for parts of our program such as fuzzing, threat modeling, secrets management, or container security
• Advocate for and lead complex security projects from inception through completion
• Drive architecture, patterns, and processes across cloud engineering that make security the easiest path
• Partner closely with engineering teams to design and implement security controls across our software and systems
• Research and POC new attacks against our systems. Plan and perform product security assessments including architecture review threat modeling, code review, pen testing and general security consulting to proactively build security controls
• Serve as a security subject matter expert for software security and architecture
• Partner with cloud detection and response to create new capabilities or respond to security events
• Educate the engineering org on security through CTFs, lunch-and-learns, and one-on-one mentorship

• 7 years of experience in application security, software security, or product security
• Demonstrated expertise in C++ programming to thoroughly assess existing codebases for security vulnerabilities and develop or support remediations and enhancements including mitigating memory-related security flaws such as buffer overflows and memory leaks
• Deep subject matter expertise in database security, application security, software security, or data security
• Deep knowledge database engines,database internals and applied cryptography
• Demonstrated ability to identify and fix security issues through manual code review, application penetration testing, or red teaming
• Scripting experience and ability to contribute code back to our environments
• Comfortable leading threat modeling and being a security ambassador to other engineering teams
• Communicate complex technical issues in a simple manner that builds trust with a variety of audiences
• A strong sense of ownership and delivery
• Can facilitate a conversation rather than dominate it
• Skilled at providing collaborative, actionable feedback, not just a list of flaws

• Working knowledge of one or more major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Experience with large scale environments

• Taking ownership of one or more security programs such as appsec, cloud, or detect/response
• Seeing projects through from conception to completion in order to deliver new services or capabilities for the team
• Establishing yourself as a go-to person for discussing security topics

The MongoDB Product Security organization works with software engineers to design, implement, and operate systems in a manner that protects customer data. It is a multidisciplinary team that covers product, software, cloud, infrastructure, and operational security concerns. The team does the following:

• Build a developer driven security program where there is tight integration with engineering artifacts, process, and tooling.
• Use software architecture and coding patterns to reduce the impact of security issues.

Be security subject matter experts for our tech stack and products.

• You will take ownership, define strategy, and drive improvement for parts of our program such as fuzzing, threat modeling, secrets management, or container security
• Advocate for and lead complex security projects from inception through completion
• Drive architecture, patterns, and processes across cloud engineering that make security the easiest path
• Partner closely with engineering teams to design and implement security controls across our software and systems
• Research and POC new attacks against our systems. Plan and perform product security assessments including architecture review threat modeling, code review, pen testing and general security consulting to proactively build security controls
• Serve as a security subject matter expert for software security and architecture
• Partner with cloud detection and response to create new capabilities or respond to security events
• Educate the engineering org on security through CTFs, lunch-and-learns, and one-on-one mentorship

• 7 years of experience in application security, software security, or product security
• Demonstrated expertise in C++ programming to thoroughly assess existing codebases for security vulnerabilities and develop or support remediations and enhancements including mitigating memory-related security flaws such as buffer overflows and memory leaks
• Deep subject matter expertise in database security, application security, software security, or data security
• Deep knowledge database engines,database internals and applied cryptography
• Demonstrated ability to identify and fix security issues through manual code review, application penetration testing, or red teaming
• Scripting experience and ability to contribute code back to our environments
• Comfortable leading threat modeling and being a security ambassador to other engineering teams
• Communicate complex technical issues in a simple manner that builds trust with a variety of audiences
• A strong sense of ownership and delivery
• Can facilitate a conversation rather than dominate it
• Skilled at providing collaborative, actionable feedback, not just a list of flaws

• Working knowledge of one or more major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Experience with large scale environments

• Taking ownership of one or more security programs such as appsec, cloud, or detect/response
• Seeing projects through from conception to completion in order to deliver new services or capabilities for the team
• Establishing yourself as a go-to person for discussing security topics

• Design, architect, build, and deliver core pieces of Atlas Online Archive, primarily coding in Java, Go & Javascript (React)
• Approach problems from a customer-focused perspective and use data to propose high ROI improvements to our product and operations
• Collaborate with colleagues and other teams in Atlas to scope, spec and deliver new features
• Define your top priorities and focuses, communicate them, and execute against them

• 3+ years experience in software engineering, primarily focused on cloud-native backend systems
• B.Sc / M.Sc in Computer Science or similar field, or equivalent practical experience
• Proficient in a modern compiled programming language (Go, Java, C#, C++, etc.)
• Experience implementing, and operating distributed storage systems with high availability and durability guarantees
• Enjoys working with others towards a common goal
• You're a self-starter! You're comfortable organizing your own time and propose changes backed by data
• Is curious, collaborative, empathetic, coachable and intellectually honest
• Great diagnostics skills, considering edge cases in designs with a bias for simplicity
• Has a passion for problem solving and learning new things in the domains of computer science and software engineering

• Experience building and testing full-stack systems (using React or similar frameworks)
• Oncall experience and having customer first approach when considering different approaches
• Experience designing Data Lake protocols (and similar e.g. Delta Lake, Hudi,...)
• Experience optimizing throughput in distributed storage systems
• Experience working with multiple cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure)

• In 1 month, you'll learn about the system and ask quality questions, go through the inner & outer loop
• In 3 months, you'll have contributed to a large project
• In 6 months, you’ll be leading the design and execution of your own project

As a senior software engineer on the Atlas Data Federation (ADF) team, you’ll be trusted with high-impact, high-visibility work on a rapidly growing platform. You’ll have the opportunity to design and implement core components of our distributed query engine. Your work will directly improve the performance, memory efficiency, and reliability of our systems. In addition, you’ll play a key role in improving our distributed control plane, which manages infrastructure and workload routing across the system. You'll participate in on-call rotations, leading incident response and postmortem analysis. Collaboration is central to this role—you’ll partner closely with other MongoDB teams, including those working on drivers, the core server, and cloud services, to ensure seamless integration and a cohesive developer experience.

• 3+ years of experience working on database or storage internals, or building core components of data processing systems such as query execution engines, storage layers, workload optimization, or autonomous tuning
• Proficiency in systems programming with languages like Go, Java, C++, or Rust
• Hands-on experience building and operating distributed systems at scale
• Excellent verbal and written technical communication skills and desire to collaborate with colleagues, mentor fellow engineers and lead projects
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• In 3 months, you’ll have contributed to a key project and fixed a few impactful bugs
• In 6 months, you’ll be reviewing code and involved in design discussions for new features
• In 12 months, you’ll lead a major initiative and mentor newer engineers on the team

As a Staff Engineer on the Atlas Data Federation and Archiving team, you will lead the design, optimization, and scalability of our storage and federated query systems. This role focuses on high-performance distributed storage, data lifecycle management, and efficient data retrieval at scale.

This role can be based in New York City, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, or remotely in the United States.

Storage & Data Processing Performance

• Architect and optimize large-scale storage solutions for federated data access, ensuring efficient retrieval, indexing, and query performance
• Optimize data archival pipelines for high-throughput ingestion, durability, and cost-efficiency
• Improve data tiering and lifecycle policies for moving and querying data efficiently across hot, warm, and cold storage tiers
• Reduce operational costs through intelligent storage layout, compaction strategies, and query execution optimizations

Distributed Query & Execution Engine

• Improve and scale our distributed query execution engine, optimizing it for multi-source federated queries and data lake processing
• Enhance query performance across object storage (e.g., S3, GCS, Azure Blob) by optimizing indexing, partitioning, and compaction techniques
• Implement workload-aware autoscaling for query execution and data processing
• Reduce incident rates by improving system resilience, failover mechanisms, and observability

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Guide architectural decisions and lead design reviews across engineering teams
• Mentor engineers in distributed systems, data storage optimization, and operational excellence
• Partner with Product Management to define the technical roadmap for storage and data federation solutions
• Participate in on-call rotation, providing senior oversight for incident response and postmortem retrospectives

• 10+ years experience in software engineering, with a focus on backend and distributed storage systems
• Expertise in large-scale storage systems, such as distributed databases, cloud object storage (S3, Azure Blob, GCS), or data lake technologies (Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, etc.)
• Strong background in designing and optimizing storage layers, indexing, and data lifecycle management
• Experience optimizing query engines for high-volume, low-latency federated data access
• Track record of improving system reliability, observability, and cost-efficiency
• Experience with Kubernetes-based deployment of distributed storage or query systems
• Proficiency in Go or Java (preferred, but not required)
• Deep understanding of query optimizers, storage formats (Parquet, ORC), and indexing strategies
• Experience with disaggregated storage and cloud-native data lake solutions
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives as an individual contributor while mentoring senior engineers and driving technical excellence within a team.

This role can be based out of our NYC office or remotely from anywhere in North America.

• Minimum 12 years of experience in programming, debugging, and performance tuning distributed and/or highly concurrent C/C++ software systems
• Strong systems fundamentals, including multi-threaded programming, performance profiling, and expert-level network programming
• Familiarity with database internals or building core components for data processing systems
• Familiarity with observability ecosystem and best practice
• Excellent verbal and written technical communication skills and a strong desire to collaborate with colleagues and mentor engineers
• Excellent time and project management skills including the ability to make realistic assessments of project cost and complexity

• Lead the architecture and implementation of low-level networking components that drive the performance, scalability, cost-efficiency, and resiliency of MongoDB Server
• Design and implement observability improvements that enable MongoDB engineers and customers to quickly and accurately diagnose the root cause of production issues
• Handle networking-related customer escalations from Technical Support team and coach teammates to do the same
• Write production-ready database code in C++, improve the existing code, and mentor their team to write higher quality code
• Own all code the Networking & Observability Team maintains, ensuring it achieves a high standard for quality (including security, durability, availability, and performance) and maintainability
• Write and improve unit and integration tests in C++, Javascript, and Python to demonstrate correctness
• Diagnose test failures, identify bugs in existing code, fix them, and prevent bugs from being introduced in new code
• Investigate the performance impact of code changes that may cause software performance regressions
• Interview candidates for advanced software engineering positions
• Develop and maintain expertise on cutting edge database, networking, and observability developments from industry and academia
• Lead development and project management of some of the largest projects across the company
• Collaborate with stakeholders and engineering teams across the company to jointly work on large initiatives
• Advise Product Management on technical product direction, engineering complexity and inter-project dependencies
• Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering leadership to define product roadmaps

• In the first month, you will have understood the high level architecture of MongoDB networking and observability, and fixed a few bugs
• In three months, you will have contributed to the development in C++ of a project slated for the next major release of MongoDB, and diagnosed and fixed a few customer or testing-reported issues
• In six months, you will have taken on code review responsibilities and are involved in reviewing the design for new features
• In twelve months, you will be leading the development of new features and initiatives, helping to mentor engineers on the team, and using your experience to drive the long-term technical roadmap of the Networking & Observability Team