Staff Software Engineer, QSS
Outreach
Software Engineering
Seattle, WA, USA
Posted on Aug 1, 2025
About the Team/Role
The Queueing and Storage Systems (QSS) team is responsible for the platform of our databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis/Valkey, and more) and queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ). The team also provides software frameworks for engineering teams to produce and consume data from all databases and services. The QSS team enables other engineering teams to build software rapidly, providing heavy lifting of managing databases and queue infrastructure.
The QSS team develops tooling and systems to automate provisioning, deployment, management, and interactions with the databases and queues used by our application teams. The team serves as subject matter experts in scaling databases and queues, and helps engineering teams deliver software following best practices and making best use of our internal data distribution systems. The team helps identify problems like hot spots, uneven load distribution, and general performance. The team also provides support for incident response for databases, queues, caching, and change data capture systems.
The QSS team builds software in support of the multi-tenant platform that is fully automated such as tenant management, sharding, change data capture, replication, denormalization, and aggregation. The software provided by the QSS allows Outreach engineering teams to focus on all the business logic around managing and querying data.
Your Daily Adventures Will Include
- Designing/building Kubernetes operators to automatically manage/provision infrastructure, scaling, deployment coordination, credentials, and upgrades
- Maintaining the reliability and performance aspects for the databases and queues for the Outreach platform
- Designing reusable storage systems for engineering teams to leverage
- Analyzing solutions and implementing best practices for our database clusters and other stateful components
- Prototyping new managed storage/queue solutions and access patterns for new services and feature roadmaps
- Developing solutions for migrating data between systems
- Providing database expertise to engineering teams (for example through reviews of database migrations, queries and performance optimizations)
- Supporting and debugging database issues across services and levels of the stack
- Proactively design and tune monitors/alerts/dashboards to alert on symptoms and not on outages
- Writing documentation to share knowledge and procedures with Outreach engineering teams
- Participate in on-call rotations and provide expertise during incident response
Our Vision of You
- You love enabling your coworkers to be successful
- Experience operating scaled/high-throughput database and/or queue platforms in production systems
- Able to write high quality code in a programming language (e.g. Golang, Ruby, Scala, Elixir, Python) that deploys to a production environment used by customers
- Experience designing and supporting internal-facing tooling where the “customers” are your coworkers
- You thrive in an ambiguous environment that requires seeking out and collaborating with both your team and the rest of the company to design effective solutions
- Understanding of which details are important and ability to prioritize incremental delivery over long-term go-dark projects
- Willingness to learn new technologies (most of our time is spent in Golang, with a smattering of Ruby/Rails)You embody our core values. We are hungry craftspeople, we have grit, we are honest, we take ownership, we have each other’s back no matter what, we’re one with our customers, and we find strength in diversity and inclusio
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