database engineer

Responsibilities

• design and implement improvements across one or more layers of our search engine (storage, indexing, querying)
• intensive performance hacking: tracing, CPU/heap profiling, optimizing data structures, using SIMD, tuning IO pipelines, etc.
• evolve our search primitives and APIs (full text + vector + reranking)
• work closely with customers to win their workloads and fold learnings back into the product
• write crisp docs

Requirements

systems engineering

• you've worked extensively in a systems language (Rust, C++, Java, Go, etc.)
• you think in memory layouts, cache lines, and syscalls
• you methodically work through problems until you've found the root cause
• domain expertise
• you're an expert in at least one of the following domains
• search internals (e.g., inverted indexes, ANN indexes, rerankers)
• distributed systems (e.g., replication, leases, fault injection, simulation/chaos testing)
• linux
• you're at home in terminals, eBPF/perf, strace, gdb
• typist
• you can write well and explain complex ideas simply
• human
• you build trust and admit what you don’t know

Preferred

multiple years of experience writing Rust

• you've maintained or operated serious systems in production, at scale
• you've made interesting contributions to the databases, IR, or systems communities (e.g., research, open source, speaking)

must have

storage engines (e.g., LSMs, WALs, MVCC, compaction, GC)

additional domain expertise in

k8s and cloud infra (GKE/EKS/AKS, disks and networking, load balancers, observability) security (multi-tenant systems, isolation, sandboxing)

tpuf is hardcore & whimsical. we value

overstep > understep show > tell complexity is earned showing up as part of our customer’s team making stuff easy to react to