Senior Lead Engineer, Storage Execution (RSS)

We are hiring a Senior Lead Engineer to manage the largely New York-based Storage Execution team. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who is obsessed with customer success, takes the responsibility of durably storing customer data seriously, and has strong empathy for both their team and our users.

About the Storage Execution team

The Storage Execution team sits at the heart of MongoDB’s Replicated Storage Services (RSS). We own the core transactional read/write path on each node, across both today’s storage engine and a next‑generation cloud-native storage architecture. Our work determines how correct and performant MongoDB is for customers running mission-critical production workloads.

The team’s responsibilities include:

• Defining and maintaining the internal collection and index APIs used by Replication, Query and Catalog modules, and commands for local reads and writes, plus the transaction and durability primitives that govern visibility, conflict resolution and crash recovery.  
• Integrating the next generation of MongoDB’s storage architecture into the server in a way that is predictable for other teams, scales with cloud elasticity, and preserves the performance and safety of the classic configuration.  
• Owning index builds and schema‑level storage operations (build/rebuild, cleanup, resumability) and ensuring they behave well for large, highly available clusters running write-heavy workloads.  
• Building validation, diagnostics, and storage‑focused test infrastructure to catch durability issues early and keep the system trustworthy at scale.  
• Partnering with neighboring teams on flow control, prioritization and load-shedding to stay within resource limits, protecting durability and availability at the cluster level without starving critical operations.

What you’ll do

• Lead, grow and manage a New York–based team of 8 to 10 engineers; ensure clear expectations, high standards, and healthy, sustainable execution
• Own the team’s roadmap across durability, availability, performance, and developer productivity, in partnership with RSS leadership and Product Management
• Manage customer escalations involving storage behavior and durability; work directly with Support, Atlas, and other server teams to reproduce, root‑cause, and resolve issues
• Drive process and tooling improvements that raise engineering velocity and code quality (e.g., ownership, review expectations, HELP/BF practices)
• Partner closely with Replication, Query, Sharding, Catalog & Routing, Storage Engines, and Atlas teams on cross‑team features such as the new storage architecture, availability improvements, and workload management
• Represent Storage Execution in planning, staffing, and calibration; make thoughtful tradeoffs between near‑term deliverables, longer‑term availability gaps, and platform investments

Candidate profile

• 8+ years building, debugging, and tuning distributed and/or highly concurrent systems software (databases, storage engines, filesystems, or similar)
• 2+ years managing engineers directly, including hiring, performance management, and coaching across a range of levels
• Strong proficiency in at least one compiled, statically-typed language such as C++, Rust, or Go; prior C++ and systems programming experience is a plus
• Deep understanding of durability, availability, and performance tradeoffs in distributed systems; experience with replication, consensus, storage engines, or transactional systems is highly desirable
• Demonstrated customer obsession: direct experience working with demanding customers (or Support/Cloud) on complex incidents and turning them into clear, outcome‑oriented recommendations
• Proven ability to develop people: mentoring and promoting engineers, managing underperformance directly, and building high‑engagement teams with low regretted attrition
• Comfortable leading multi‑quarter initiatives with multiple stakeholders and using written documents to align teams on design, scope, and tradeoffs
• Able and willing to work from the New York City office most days, alongside the engineers you lead

Success measures

In three months, you have:

• Built strong relationships with your team and key partner teams
• Taken over team ceremonies, short‑term planning, and on‑call/HELP/BF r