Senior Software Engineer — Distributed Data and Retrieval Platform

Details

Bloomberg runs on financial data. Every price, corporate action, benchmark, security master update, point-in-time view, and derived fact must be correct, fast, durable, and available at global scale.

Our team builds the distributed OLTP storage layer behind some of Bloomberg’s most critical financial data systems. We provide deterministic, purpose-built APIs that let Bloomberg engineers read and write financial data safely, while our platform absorbs the complexity of Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, RocksDB, sharding, replication, compaction, observability, capacity management, and failure recovery.

This is a role for engineers who want to work close to the metal of distributed data systems. You will reason about query routing, storage-engine behavior, schema evolution, read-your-own-write consistency, hot shards, p99 latency, saturation, compaction debt, replication lag, backfills, and safe production rollout. When Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, RocksDB, or related tooling need to change to meet Bloomberg’s requirements, we are prepared to make those changes — and contribute them upstream.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the distributed OLTP storage layer and store services that make Bloomberg financial data discoverable, queryable, point-in-time accurate, and reliable.
• Design deterministic, low-latency access patterns and APIs for structured, schema-evolving datasets while preserving consistency, low latency, operational safety, and auditability.
• Reason about and improve production behavior: source-level debugging, disciplined benchmarking, workload modeling, high-cardinality observability, automated operations, safe rollout, and tooling for production analysis.
• Work on both latency-sensitive OLTP traffic and high-throughput readers that power downstream systems (including Bloomberg’s S3-based BBDS lakehouse).
• Diagnose and improve performance across the stack: application code, JVM, Linux, networking, MySQL, MyRocks, RocksDB, and Vitess.
• Contribute improvements back to upstream open-source systems when necessary.

Requirements

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong programming skills in one or more of Java, Go, C, or C++.
• Deep experience or strong interest in database internals, distributed systems, storage engines, or large-scale data infrastructure.
• Strong debugging skills across application code, infrastructure, networking, and Linux.
• Experience reasoning from first principles about throughput, latency, contention, queuing, caching, compaction, replication, saturation, and failure modes.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience.

We’d love to see

• Contributions to infrastructure projects such as Vitess, MySQL, RocksDB, MyRocks, or similar systems.
• Experience operating or extending sharded MySQL, Vitess, distributed SQL, or large-scale OLTP platforms.
• Experience profiling and tuning production systems with JFR, async-profiler, perf, eBPF, flame graphs, heap analysis, or custom benchmarking frameworks.
• A track record of building reliable systems where correctness, latency, and operability matter.
• A passion for mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar of a platform team.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits plan (medical, dental, vision, short and long term disability, 401(k) with match, life insurance, paid holidays, paid time off, and wellness programs).
• Total rewards may include merit increases, incentive compensation (exempt roles only), and bonus.

Compensation

Salary Range: 160,000 - 240,000 USD Annual + Benefits + Bonus