Embedded Software Engineer - Labs

DoorDash Labs, established in 2018, serves as the innovation hub for DoorDash, focusing on developing automation and robotics solutions to enhance last-mile logistics. The team's mission is to create technologies that support and augment human networks, aiming to improve efficiency for Dashers, merchants, and consumers alike. We’re ruthlessly focused on business impact. We are a highly senior team composed of former pioneers from a variety of different robotics industries. As of 2025, DoorDash has completed 10B lifetime deliveries. We’re focused on how to do the next 10B even better.

The Storage teams build and operate online stateful systems and abstractions that are reliable, efficient, secure and easy to use for DoorDash Engineering. The teams are responsible for understanding Product Engineering’s evolving needs and developing platform and infrastructure capabilities to serve them. The team currently supports CockroachDB, Cassandra, Kafka and Redis as well as data abstraction services to reduce the complexity of interacting with storage systems for Product Engineers.

We are looking for a Senior/Staff Embedded Software Engineer to lead the development and bring-up of ARM-based microcontroller platforms across our robotics products. This is a high-ownership role, directly responsible for building the low-level firmware that powers our platforms. You will design, implement, and validate firmware for motion control, sensor integration, communications, power management, and safety-critical functionality. This role comes with a strong expectation of hands-on board bring-up, low-level debugging, and cross-disciplinary collaboration with electrical and systems engineers.

• Own the firmware bring-up and integration for new embedded platforms (e.g. ARM Cortex-M series).
• Develop and maintain bare-metal firmware and RTOS-based applications for robotic subsystems (motor control, sensors, telemetry, power systems).
• Write and maintain robust, maintainable, and well-documented C/C++ code for embedded targets.
• Collaborate with the electrical engineering team on hardware bring-up, schematic review, and system integration.
• Lead system bringup, validation, and debug
• Contribute to firmware safety, reliability, and system-level robustness.

We’re hiring a Data Solutions Engineer with deep expertise in distributed databases, particularly Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and database agnostic abstractions. In this role, you will design, optimize, and scale distributed data access layers that power DoorDash’s most critical systems, ensuring high availability, low latency, and fault tolerance.

You’ll serve as a hands-on architect and technical partner to product engineering and infrastructure teams, helping translate complex business requirements into resilient and scalable data models. Your work will directly influence the evolution of Taulu, DoorDash’s unified storage abstraction layer, by shaping best practices and identifying platform gaps through real world engagements.

This is a high-impact, cross functional role that combines deep technical expertise with a customer centric approach. You’ll lead solutioning engagements from design through production, drive the adoption of Taulu modeling best practices, and ensure that our systems meet goals around reliability, cost efficiency, and velocity. You must be located in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Seattle or New York for this hybrid opportunity. 

• Design and implement highly scalable, fault tolerant distributed database solutions using Taulu, Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and other paved path storage solutions. 
• Architect and optimize multi-region, globally distributed systems to meet our high standards for availability, latency, and throughput.
• Lead data modeling, performance tuning, and capacity planning for large-scale, mission-critical storage workloads.
• Partner with product engineering and infrastructure teams to deeply understand domain specific data needs and guide them in adopting paved path storage solutions.
• Serve as the DRI for solutioning engagements, owning modeling in Taulu from experimentation through launch and scale.
• Shape the evolution of Taulu by identifying abstraction gaps and converting customer feedback into platform improvements.
• Apply workload-aware design patterns, including caching strategies, partitioning, and consistency tuning to improve performance and efficiency.
• Drive adoption of operational best practices across observability, schema design, capacity planning, and cost optimization across storage systems.
• Promote clarity and continuity by contributing to solutioning playbooks, decision logs, and architectural documentation.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of hands-on experience in embedded systems development.
• Deep expertise in bare-metal programming on ARM microcontrollers.
• Strong proficiency in C/C++ for embedded targets and firmware design patterns.
• Experience with hardware bring-up and low-level debugging on custom boards.
• Solid understanding of digital electronics, buses (I2C, SPI, UART, CAN), and embedded peripherals.
• Strong system-level thinking, with an ability to work independently and take ownership across the full development cycle.
• Must be comfortable regularly exercising discretion and independent judgment in performing job duties, including evaluating options, making informed decisions, and determining appropriate courses of action within the scope of assigned responsibilities.

• Experience with RTOS (e.g., FreeRTOS, Zephyr) or Embedded Linux on constrained systems.
• Familiarity with motor control, power systems, or battery management in robotics or automotive contexts.
• Experience working closely with hardware teams, reading schematics, and performing board-level debug.
• Familiarity with safety-critical systems, watchdogs, and fault handling.
• Comfortable working in fast-paced, high-ownership engineering environments like those found in startups or advanced R&D teams

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• You have 10+ years of experience designing and scaling distributed data systems, with deep expertise in NoSQL technologies like Apache Cassandra, DynamoDB, or ScyllaDB.
• You have a strong command of distributed system concepts such as replication, partitioning, tunable consistency, and failure recovery.
• You’ve led data modeling efforts for high-throughput, low-latency workloads and understand the real-world trade-offs involved in NoSQL schema design.
• You are experienced with caching technologies like Redis or Memcached and know how to layer them effectively over storage systems to optimize for performance and cost.
• You have a customer-first mindset, and thrive when working closely with product and platform teams to translate complex requirements into clean, scalable data models.
• You are skilled at communicating complex architecture decisions and building alignment across infrastructure and product engineering organizations.
• You have a track record of mentoring engineers, influencing data architecture at scale, and fostering best practices in reliability, observability, and data access patterns.
• You document decisions, share learnings, and take pride in contributing to reusable playbooks and durable frameworks for others to build upon.
• Bonus: You’ve worked on or contributed to open-source distributed databases.