Staff Software Engineer

### Who you are
- Strong experience (5+ years) designing, implementing, and operating backend services in C#/.NET
- Proven track record building and scaling high-throughput, low-latency services (e.g., search, recommendation, or other read-heavy systems)
- Deep hands-on experience with Redis and other cache technologies, including key design, eviction strategies, cache invalidation patterns, and multi-layer caching topologies
- Solid understanding of event-driven architectures and Kafka (or similar systems)
- Strong experience with database systems (SQL/NoSQL), including schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, and handling high-volume read/write workloads
- Strong grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, failure modes, circuit breaking, timeouts, retry/backoff strategies
- Experience with observability and performance tuning in production (profiling, capacity planning, latency/throughput trade-offs)
- Comfortable using AI-assisted development tools (for example, to accelerate implementation, test coverage, code reviews, or incident analysis) in a safe and responsible way
- History of acting as a technical leader on a product or platform team: setting direction, influencing roadmaps, and being accountable for significant system outcomes
- Demonstrated bias for action: proactively unblocking teams, building prototypes, driving decisions to closure, and moving complex initiatives forward without waiting for perfect information
- Demonstrated ability to decompose large, ambiguous initiatives into clear technical plans that multiple engineers can execute
- Comfortable working with cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Design, Data, other Engineering teams) to balance technical constraints, user experience, and business impact
- A bias toward data-informed decisions: using metrics and experiments to validate whether changes are improving outcomes
- Experience with search or ranking systems
- Background in reservation or marketplace platforms where availability and matching are core problems
- Familiarity with Kubernetes-based deployments, service meshes, and modern CI/CD pipelines

### What the job involves
- The Diner Core Availability team builds and operates the systems that power availability search for the core diner experience—delivering fast, reliable booking options across our global network
- We serve millions of diners, handle several thousands of searches per second, and operate under strict low-latency and high-reliability requirements. The team owns the end-to-end lifecycle of availability queries: from ingesting upstream changes (inventory, policies, events) through event-driven pipelines, to maintaining highly-optimized in-memory and distributed cache layers, to responding to real-time search requests from web and mobile clients
- We’re looking for a Staff Engineer who applies a deep understanding of the underlying technologies and dependencies to solve problems. They help raise the bar on performance, reliability, and simplicity as we scale availability search at OpenTable
- Technologies you’ll work with include C#/.NET, Redis, in-memory and distributed caches, RESTful APIs, and Kafka-based event-driven architectures (EDA)
- You’ll be both a hands-on engineer and a technical leader: writing code, writing technical design docs, reviewing design docs, and owning solutions end-to-end from design through rollout, observability, and ongoing iteration
- Design, implement, and evolve C#/.NET services and APIs that expose availability information to internal and external consumers
- Own the architecture of availability search services and related caches, ensuring low-latency, high-throughput performance at global scale
- Define strategies for in-memory and distributed caching (e.g., Redis) that balance freshness, consistency, and cost
- Lead the evolution of our event-driven architecture (Kafka) for propagating inventory, configuration, and policy changes into availability systems
- Make pragmatic trade-offs between delivery speed, technical quality, operational risk, and cost
- Use AI tooling thoughtfully (e.g., for design exploration, code generation, test scaffolding, and incident analysis) to increase team velocity while maintaining a high quality bar
- Break down large, ambiguous availability initiatives into sequenced technical workstreams
- Provide reliable estimates and hold yourself accountable to delivery commitments, while adjusting plans thoughtfully as new information emerges
- Proactively identify and unblock cross-team dependencies across other backend and platform teams
- Represent the team in projects you own during sync meetings by providing clear, and actionable updates
- Set and uphold code, design, and review standards for the team in C#/.NET and our surrounding ecosystem, with a focus on simplicity, testability, readability, and long-term maintainability
- Represent the Diner Core Availability team in cross-team forums and communities of practice, ensuring our systems align with platform-wide standards while feeding local needs back into those standards
- Foster a healthy, inclusive engineering culture: encourage thoughtful debate, blameless retros, and data-driven decision-making

### Benefits
- Work from (almost) anywhere - wherever you do your best work
- Mental health and well-being - company-paid therapy sessions through SpringHealth, company-paid subscription to HeadSpace, and company-wide weeks off a year so the whole team can recharge
- Generous parental leave
- Generous paid vacation + time off for your birthday
- Paid volunteer time
- Enriched learning and development opportunities - leadership development & access to thousands of on-demand e-learnings