Want to know if this job is worth applying to?
Seattle, Washington, United States
Hybrid
At Compass, our mission is to help everyone find their place in the world. Founded in 2012, we’re revolutionizing the real estate industry with our end-to-end platform that empowers residential real estate agents to deliver exceptional service to seller and buyer clients.
About the Role
Every transaction, every listing view, every agent interaction at Compass touches a database, a cache, or a streaming pipeline owned by the Streaming & Durability team. This team is responsible for the foundational data layer: the systems that have to be fast, correct, and isolated across thousands of tenants, every single time.
We don't just keep the lights on. We're solving hard, unsolved problems: how do you enforce tenant-level data isolation across a fleet of shared PostgreSQL clusters and Redis/Valkey caches without sacrificing latency? How do you upgrade 50+ production databases with zero downtime while application teams ship features on top of them? How do you build SDKs that make the safe path the easy path for hundreds of engineers who never think about infrastructure?
As a Senior Engineer, you'll own answers to those questions. You'll design systems that quietly protect millions of records, ship tooling that engineers across the company reach for by default, and operate infrastructure where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in trust, not just latency.
Responsibilities
- Design and operate the database and caching fleet (RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis/ValKey, DynamoDB) that underpins Compass's core products, making decisions about replication, failover, capacity, and engine strategy that affect every team in the company.
- Build multi-tenant data isolation into Compass's data layer from the ground up, shipping SDKs in Go, Java, and Python that enforce tenant-safe access patterns so product engineers can move fast without risking cross-tenant data exposure.
- Own production database upgrades at fleet scale, coordinating engine version bumps and Terraform state mutations across hundreds of clusters with zero customer-facing impact.
- Build and scale Kafka/MSK streaming infrastructure, the connective tissue between Compass services, including topic architecture, consumer patterns, and blue/green deployment strategies.
- Develop deep observability into the data layer, including SLI dashboards, tenant-dimensioned telemetry, and real-time performance insights that let the team (and the company) understand system behavior before customers do.
- Partner directly with product and platform teams to assess database readiness for scaling events, migrate workloads onto golden-path infrastructure, and resolve the hardest production incidents in the stack.
Basic Qualifications
- 7+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems at production scale in AWS.
- Depth in at least one major managed database (PostgreSQL or similar).
- You've operated Kafka/MSK at scale and dealt with the hard parts: consumer lag, partition rebalancing, cross-account IAM auth.
- You've built shared tooling (SDKs, client libraries, platform APIs), and you understand what it takes to make infrastructure accessible and safe for engineers who aren't infrastructure specialists.
- You think in trade-offs, not absolutes. You can articulate why you'd choose a soft application-enforced boundary over a hard infrastructure lock and when that calculus changes.
- You write Go (or can ramp quickly) and you're comfortable in Terraform, Kubernetes, and IAM-heavy AWS environments.
- You've led cross-team operational programs ,including change management, migration coordination, and rollback planning, where the blast radius of a mistake extends well beyond your own team.
Preferred Qualifications
- You've worked on multi-tenant isolation problems such as key prefixing, row-level security, and RBAC/ACL models and have opinions about where application-layer enforcement breaks down.
- You've built or contributed to observability platforms, specifically for database and cache monitoring.
Compensation: The base pay range for this position is $176,000-$196,100; however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Bonuses and restricted stock units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of benefits. Base pay is based on market location. Minimum wage for the position will always be met.
Perks that You Need to Know About:
Participation in our incentive programs (which may include eligible cash, equity, or commissions). Plus paid vacation, holidays, sick time, parental leave, and recharge leave; medical, tele-health, dental and vision benefits; 401(k) plan; flexible spending accounts (FSAs); commuter program; life and disability insurance; Maven (a support system for new parents); Carrot (fertility benefits); UrbanSitter (caregiver referral network); Employee Assistance Program; and pet insurance.
