Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

Salary: £55,000 - 95,000 per year

Requirements:

• Significant experience designing, building, or operating distributed databases or production infrastructure at scale.
• Deep expertise in at least one of these areas, with an interest in working across the broader stack: Vitess or a comparable sharded SQL system; MySQL server internals; or 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.
• Preferred: Accepted upstream contributions to Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, RocksDB, or another database or storage project.
• Preferred: Experience operating database fleets at thousands-of-shards scale.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement capabilities to safely operate and evolve our 10,000+ shard Vitess/MySQL/MyRocks fleet across regions.
• Work in Go and C++ across Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, and RocksDB, using Python where appropriate 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, to correlate metrics, logs, traces, topology, code paths, and recent changes, accelerating diagnosis and supporting 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 our platform depends.

Technologies:

• AI
• CTO
• Hardware
• MySQL
• Python
• SQL
• Vitess
• Support

More:

We are Bloomberg, and our business runs on financial data that must be correct, durable, globally available, and served with low latency. In Engineering and CTO, our team builds and operates Bloombergs distributed OLTP storage platform, supporting petabytes of critical financial data across more than 10,000 MySQL shards. We build custom read and write APIs that provide engineers with safe, predictable access to financial data while managing the complexity and operational risks of sharding and database infrastructure. This hands-on Senior Software Engineer role works at the intersection of distributed systems and database internals, with opportunities to improve our platform and contribute fixes and features upstream. The role is based in London. We welcome applications from candidates who can demonstrate the necessary skills; years of experience, where stated, are a guide.

last updated 39 week of 2026