# Staff Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

**Company:** [Gusto](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/gusto)
**Location:** Denver, CO, San Francisco, CA, New York, NY, Los Angeles, CA, Seattle, WA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $200k – $270k/yr
**Experience:** 12+ years
**Skills:** Tidb, Kubernetes, AWS, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Cockroachdb, Vitess, S3
**Posted:** 2026-01-27

> Staff engineer architects and operates distributed database systems (TiDB) on Kubernetes, leads zero-downtime migrations, and optimizes storage infrastructure for scale. Requires 12+ years experience with distributed systems and AWS.

## Job Description

## Here's what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Architect, deploy, and own the full lifecycle of distributed database systems (TiDB) on Kubernetes at scale, ensuring high availability, data consistency, and operational excellence
- Coordinate complex, zero-downtime migrations from monolithic to distributed architectures, including vertical sharding to isolate Product Services
- Define and drive efficiency improvements across the storage infrastructure through query optimization, caching strategies, and workload management
- Define standards and build reliable automation to ensure data consistency, integrity, and security across distributed systems
- Continuously improve operational excellence by reducing on-call burden through sustainable, long-term solutions
- Partner with product engineering teams and technical collaborators to enable rapid and reliable product development
- Mentor engineers across the Datastores Infrastructure team on best practices for operating complex, self-hosted distributed systems, actively developing our collective operational expertise

## Here's what we're looking for:
- **12+ years** of software engineering experience building and scaling large-scale infrastructure systems
- Hands-on experience building and operating distributed databases on Kubernetes (**strongly preferred: TiDB**; alternatively: CockroachDB, Vitess, Citus, or similar solutions)
- Deep expertise in distributed data systems including horizontal sharding, partitioning strategies, and distributed transaction management
- Proven experience coordinating complex, zero-downtime migrations affecting production systems at scale
- **5+ years** of AWS experience with RDS, Aurora, caching systems (Redis/ValKey), streaming platforms (Kafka), and infrastructure optimization at scale
- Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify technical complexity and collaborate on technical direction across teams
- Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment, leveraging AI tooling to enhance infrastructure operations, driving improvements in query optimization, performance evaluation, and infrastructure automation

**Bonus:**
- Experience with service extraction and vertical sharding from monolithic architectures
- Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale

## Compensation
$200,000-$230,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $230,000-$270,000/yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York.

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