Lead, Engineering

MongoDB’s mission is to empower innovators to create, transform, and disrupt industries by unleashing the power of software and data. We enable organizations of all sizes to easily build, scale, and run modern applications by helping them modernize legacy workloads, embrace innovation, and unleash AI. Our industry-leading developer data platform, MongoDB Atlas, is the only globally distributed, multi-cloud database and is available in more than 115 regions across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Atlas allows customers to build and run applications anywhere—on premises, or across cloud providers. With offices worldwide and over 175,000 new developers signing up to use MongoDB every month, it’s no wonder that leading organizations, like Samsung and Toyota, trust MongoDB to build next-generation, AI-powered applications.

The Cluster Scalability Team builds features into the MongoDB Server that enable operators to scale their workload seamlessly from 100 to 100 billion operations a day.  The team is responsible for specifying where data is stored and building the distributed protocols for quickly moving data around a cluster to achieve the desired data distribution. This includes building primitives to both move small ranges of data, and to rewrite an entire collection across a sharded cluster with a new sharding partition key and data distribution. Nearly all of the code the team writes is in our public repository.

In the near-term we'll be focusing on making our data movement primitives more reliable, resilient, and performant. In the future, we hope to expand our scaling flexibility to specialized workloads, make sharding invisible to users, and more intelligently arrange data placement to transparently support dynamic customer workloads. 

Our team champions a strong culture of inclusivity, diversity, and collaboration. If you want to work on a collaborative team that applies distributed systems fundamentals to deliver core features of a popular database, join us! Let’s change what’s possible for application developers, system architects, and database operators.

This role can be based out of our New York City office or remotely in the North America region.

As the Team Lead for Cluster Scalability, you will be responsible for managing the engineering team taking on challenging, high-visibility projects that improve and enhance the performance, scalability, and reliability of sharded MongoDB clusters. Our team is distributed across North America, supporting both in-office and remote work with convenient work hours for each time-zone.

Candidate Profile

• 3+ years of experience managing teams of software engineers. This includes people-management responsibilities such as hiring, performance and growth management, compensation planning, mentoring, and growing strong software engineering teams
• 8+ years of experience building production-level code with a large user base, robust design structure, and rigorous code quality
• Demonstrates excellent verbal and written technical communication skills and desire to collaborate with colleagues, mentor fellow engineers, and lead projects
• Degree in Computer Science or similar field, or equivalent practical experience, with strong competencies in data structures, algorithms, and software design/architecture
• Solid experience in designing, writing, testing, and maintaining highly distributed systems and/or data storage software
• Experience with large backend/compiled codebases and compiled languages, preferably in C++/C/Rust/Go/Java
• Regardless of prior experience, they are willing, able, and excited to quickly learn new things in the domains of computer science and software engineering They are curious about how people and organizations use MongoDB and how to make every MongoDB user successful with sharding

Position Expectations

• Onboard onto a highly technical product as an individual contributor to gain product knowledge before taking on managerial responsibilities.
• Actively participate in hiring for the Cluster Scalability team
• Lead and grow other engineers to coordinate seamless changes in a large, feature-rich code base
• Manage engineers effectively in all aspects of people management (performance and growth, compensation, mentoring, etc.)
• Work with product managers, program managers, and other teams to specify, prioritize and deliver new features that delight our users
• Estimate task complexity and timeline, report progress, and voice risks for projects executed by reports to stakeholders
• Ensure that the team is running smoothly by independently eliminating technical barriers, coordinating with other teams regarding dependencies, and focusing on the overall happiness of the team
• Contribute to planning for organizational growth, including allocation of engineering resources, future hiring plans, and assignment of projects
• Ensure high quality and velocity in the design and implementation of new functionality in the Server that reports up to you
• Handle distributed systems related customer escalations from the Technical Support team and coach teammates to do the same

Success Measures

• In the first month, you’ll have understood the surface area and the high level architecture of Cluster Scalability, committed a few small changes to the Server codebase, and gained a familiarity with the required day to day processes to manage the team
• In three months, you’ll have onboarded onto the team, contributed to the design and development of features, taken over management of your new reports, assumed responsibility for the day to day processes necessary to keep the lights on, and taken on full responsibility for projects slated for the subsequent quarter
• In six months, your team has delivered at least one significant project, your reports have meaningfully grown in their skills, you have built trusting relationships with those reports, and you have meaningfully increased the velocity of the team
• In twelve months, you’ll have performed a full annual cycle of performance and growth conversations with your team members, contributed to the vision for the future of the Cluster Scalability team, and helped develop a plan to achieve that vision. You have established your role as a leader in the organization such that team members naturally go to you for guidance

To drive the personal growth and business impact of our employees, we’re committed to developing a supportive and enriching culture for everyone. From employee affinity groups, to fertility assistance and a generous parental leave policy, we value our employees’ wellbeing and want to support them along every step of their professional and personal journeys. Learn more about what it’s like to work at MongoDB, and help us make an impact on the world!

MongoDB is committed to providing any necessary accommodations for individuals with disabilities within our application and interview process. To request an accommodation due to a disability, please inform your recruiter.

MongoDB is an equal opportunities employer.

REQ ID: 1263094617