Software Engineer, Backend - Unified Gateway

About the Team

Help us build the world's most reliable, on-demand logistics engine for last-mile delivery! We're bringing on experienced engineers to help us create and maintain a 24x7, no downtime, global infrastructure system that powers Door Dash's three-sided marketplace of consumers, merchants, and dashers.

As a member of the Unified Gateway team, you’ll build and maintain the API Gateway platform that sits at the front door of Door Dash's traffic — an HTTP-to-gRPC reverse proxy that accepts REST/JSON requests, translates them into Protocol Buffer messages, calls downstream gRPC services, and translates the responses back to clients. The platform empowers product engineers to declaratively define, test, deploy, and operate their API endpoints without standing up and managing their own edge services.

It centrally handles authentication, authorization, request and response mapping, header propagation, encryption, and resilience, and powers experiences across Door Dash, Wolt, and Deliveroo spanning iOS, Android, and Web. By providing this robust platform, we deliver significant improvements in:

• Velocity: Product engineers can iterate faster and deliver features more quickly.
• Scalability: The platform is designed to handle increasing demand and traffic seamlessly.
• Reliability: A safe programming model, centralized management, and standardized practices enhance system stability and reduce errors.
• Cost Efficiency: Consolidating resources and streamlining processes optimizes operational costs across Door Dash.

• Design and build robust, scalable systems with engineering excellence and long-term maintainability in mind.
• Improve performance, reliability, scalability, and security across the gateway and its request-processing pipeline.
• Drive best practices in API management, service discovery, load balancing, and fault tolerance.
• Champion adoption of the Unified Gateway platform across product teams.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues in our high-throughput production environment.
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies to enhance the platform's capabilities.
  
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• Leverage the latest AI-assisted development tools and best practices.

• You have 2+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• You have experience with gRPC, REST APIs, Protocol Buffers, and service-to-service communication patterns.
• You have deep knowledge of best practices in Kotlin (or another JVM language) for building high-scale, resilient systems; familiarity with asynchronous/reactive frameworks such as Vert.x is a plus.
• You have experience working on high-throughput, mission-critical production systems.
• You have a strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including consistency, fault tolerance, load balancing, and resilience patterns.
• You are comfortable with API gateway and proxy concerns — authentication and authorization, request routing, and schema/contract management (e.g., OpenAPI).
• You value solving problems at the platform level, building abstractions that make life easier for hundreds of engineers.
• You have proficiency in using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in the full software development lifecycle, including designing, generating code, testing, monitoring and releasing software

Actual compensation within the pay range listed below will be decided based on factors including, but not limited to, skills, prior relevant experience, and specific work location. Base salary is localized according to employee work location.

In addition to base salary, the compensation for this role includes opportunities for equity grants. Talk to your recruiter for more information.

Door Dash cares about you and your overall well-being. That’s why we offer a comprehensive benefits package for all regular employees, that includes paid time off, paid parental leave, wellness benefit and several paid holidays.

Additionally, for full-time employees, Door Dash offers medical, dental, and vision benefits, disability and basic life insurance, an RRSP including an employer match, and a mental health program, among others.

To learn more about our benefits, visit our careers page here.

The base pay for this position ranges from our lowest geographical market up to our highest geographical market within British Columbia.

$120,000 — $150,000 CAD

We’re committed to growing and empowering a more inclusive community within our company, industry, and cities. That’s why we hire and cultivate diverse teams of people from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe that true innovation happens when everyone has room at the table and the tools, resources, and opportunity to excel.

If you need any accommodations, please inform your recruiting contact upon initial connection.