Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases Vitess/MySQL/MyRocks

Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases Vitess/MySQL/MyRocks Overview

Bloomberg operates on a foundation of financial data, ensuring that every record is accurate, durable, globally accessible, and delivered with low latency. The team is responsible for developing Bloomberg’s distributed OLTP storage platform, managing petabytes of critical financial data across more than 10,000 MySQL shards, utilizing InnoDB and MyRocks as storage engines, and employing Vitess for sharding and cluster management.

This position is a hands-on software engineering role that sits at the intersection of distributed systems and database internals. The successful candidate will be tasked with building the software that manages and evolves this extensive fleet, diagnosing complex production behaviors at the source code level, and contributing enhancements and fixes to the Vitess and MySQL/MyRocks/RocksDB ecosystems.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement capabilities that safely operate and evolve a 10,000+ shard Vitess/MySQL/MyRocks fleet across regions.
• Work in Go and C++ across Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, and RocksDB, using Python where it is the right tool for automation, testing, and analysis.
• Improve query serving, replication, automated failover, online schema changes, VReplication and resharding, backup and restore, major-version upgrades, compaction, capacity management, and workload isolation.
• Diagnose production issues across query execution, transactions, locking, replication, storage engines, filesystems, operating systems, runtimes, and hardware.
• Build operational intelligence—including carefully tested AI-assisted tooling—that correlates metrics, logs, traces, topology, code paths, and recent changes to accelerate diagnosis and support safe, auditable remediation.
• Participate in a sustainable on-call rotation and turn recurring incidents and operational work into durable platform improvements.
• Lead technical designs and incident investigations, mentor engineers, and contribute to the open-source projects on which the platform depends.

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing, building, or operating distributed databases or production infrastructure at scale.
• Deep expertise in at least one of the following areas, with an interest in working across the broader stack: Vitess or a comparable sharded SQL system, MySQL server internals, MyRocks, RocksDB, or another LSM-based storage engine.
• Strong production software engineering skills in Go and/or C++, including the ability to understand and modify large, mature systems codebases.
• Experience debugging complex behavior through profiling, tracing, thread and process analysis, source-code inspection, operating-system telemetry, and controlled reproduction.
• Experience making high-risk infrastructure changes safely through testing, staged rollout, observability, fault containment, and rollback.
• Clear technical judgment and the ability to communicate designs, trade-offs, incidents, and operational risks.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

We would also appreciate seeing accepted upstream contributions to Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, RocksDB, or other database or storage projects, as well as experience operating database fleets at a scale of thousands of shards.

This role combines database internals, fleet-scale distributed systems, production ownership, and meaningful open-source impact. Join us in London to shape the storage platform behind some of Bloomberg’s most important financial data systems.

If indicated, please note that years of experience are a guide; we will consider applications from all candidates who can demonstrate the skills necessary for the role.

Bloomberg provides reasonable adjustment/accommodation to individuals with disabilities. Please inform us if you require any adjustments to apply for a job.

Bloomberg is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination in employment.

Degree Requirement: Bachelor’s

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