Staff Software Engineer, Notification Hub

3 days ago

Toronto, ON, Canada Doordashcanada Full-time
Description:

About the Team The Notification Hub and Experience team is a product-focused engineering team responsible for one of the company's most scalable growth levers. Our mission is to deliver intelligent, personalized notifications that reach the right user, in the right channel, at the right time. The Notification Hub is the home of comms personalized to you, where every notification a customer has ever gotten lives on, browsable and actionable, so a missed push never means a missed deal. We operate at a massive scale, and we are transitioning from a campaign-centric mode to a fully personalized experience that treats notifications as a sequential, over-time experience with continuously learning from user behavior.

About the Role We are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join our team. As a Staff Engineer, you are a technical leader and trusted advisor — you set the engineering excellence bar, own ambiguous cross-functional problems, and shape the roadmap for your domain. You will be the technical visionary leading our transition into high-level autonomy. You will drive the architecture and strategy for our notification experience at massive scale, while making every notification smarter, more timely, and more relevant for millions of customers.

This role requires a deep understanding of distributed systems, AI fluency, and a product-minded approach to technical leadership. You will be responsible for building a system that balances immediate conversion value against long-term reachability costs.

You’re excited about this opportunity because you will… Technical Leadership & Architecture

Define and own the multi-quarter technical strategy for notification hub and experience team.

Architect the notification system and experience, moving from campaign centric notification to an integrated personalized system that reasons over the entire user notification lifecycle.

Make high-quality architectural decisions across relevance, latency, and system complexity

Raise the engineering excellence bar for the Notification Hub & Experience team and consistently identify and drive areas for improvement.

Partner with cross functional teams to integrate intelligence and evolve the system over time

Product Development

Build and ship notification system at massive scale with smart and personalized experience

Identify opportunities in notification system and lifecycle to drive larger business impact

Prototype quickly to explore new ideas, while knowing when to invest in more durable systems

Stay current with emerging AI tools, models, and harness, and bring them into the team where they create leverage

Help define whole system architecture and experimentation approaches for personalized notification system

Business Outcome Ownership

Translate product goals into clear technical approaches and measurable outcomes

Own the impact of your work, including engagement and user experience metrics

Demonstrate product thinking alongside technical depth. PMs and EMs should view you as a co-owner of the Notifications domain, not just the technical executor.

Cross-Functional & Cross-Org Influence

Partner with product, design, data science, and infrastructure teams to shape strategy and resolve ambiguous, high-stakes technical decisions.

Lead project coordination across engineers and multiple workstreams simultaneously; own timelines, dependencies, and stakeholder communication.

Collaborate with Product, Design, and Marketing to help align notification strategies across different surfaces and use cases

People & Force Multiplication

Eliminate single points of failure, including yourself through proactive documentation, knowledge transfer, and building durable systems and processes.

Mentor and grow E4/E5 engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and direct coaching; take accountability for their technical development.

Act as a force multiplier by uplifting the team's technical skill set in AI fluency and high-scale backend engineering.

Raise the technical bar for the team.

Engineering Excellence & Reliability

Own end-to-end reliability of notification delivery; drive SLA improvements, reduce latency, and eliminate systemic failure modes across a high-throughput distributed infrastructure.

Champion observability, operational hygiene, and developer productivity improvements across the team.

We’re excited about you because… Required:

7+ years of backend engineering experience with clear, demonstrated Staff-level impact - you have driven large, ambiguous, cross-functional projects with org-wide or company-wide outcomes.

Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (Go, Java, Python, C++, Kotlin or similar).

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