Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases (Vitess/MySQL/MyRocks)

Overview

In this hands-on role, you will design and operate Bloomberg’s distributed OLTP storage for a 10,000+ shard fleet, using Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, and RocksDB. You’ll diagnose production behavior at code depth, contribute fixes upstream, and drive durable platform improvements. You’ll work across Go, C++, and Python to enhance reliability, scaling, and automation, while mentoring engineers and shaping open-source contributions. This position blends database internals with fleet-scale systems in a collaborative, on-call environment.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement capabilities to safely operate and evolve a 10,000+ shard Vitess/MySQL/MyRocks fleet across regions
• Develop in Go and C++ across Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, and RocksDB; use Python for automation and testing
• Improve query serving, replication, failover, online schema changes, VReplication, resharding, backup/restore, upgrades, compaction, capacity management, and workload isolation
• Diagnose production issues across query execution, transactions, locking, replication, storage engines, filesystems, OS, runtimes, and hardware
• Build operational intelligence and AI-assisted tooling to correlate metrics/logs/traces/topology to speed diagnosis and remediation
• Participate in on-call rotation and convert incidents into durable platform improvements
• Lead technical designs and incident investigations, mentor engineers, and contribute to open-source projects on which the platform depends

Key requirements

• Significant experience designing, building, or operating distributed databases or production infrastructure at scale
• Deep expertise in Vitess or a comparable sharded SQL system, or MySQL server internals, or MyRocks/RocksDB
• Strong production software engineering skills in Go and/or C++, with ability to work on large mature codebases
• Experience debugging through profiling, tracing, thread/process analysis, source-code inspection, OS telemetry, and controlled repro
• Experience making high-risk infra changes safely via testing, staged rollout, observability, fault containment, and rollback
• Clear technical judgment and ability to communicate designs, trade-offs, incidents, and operational risks
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience

• Clear communication of designs and trade-offs
• Mentorship and leadership in incident investigations
• On-call ownership and collaboration across teams
• Vitess
• MySQL server internals
• MyRocks, RocksDB

…