database engineer

Database Engineer

Turbopuffer is looking for database engineers who want to advance the frontier of search.

What you'll do:

• 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

Must have:

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

Nice to have:

• 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)
• 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