Software Engineer, Databases

Department: Engineering

Location: *HQ - San Francisco, CA

Compensation: $180K – $250K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Cartesia

Our mission is to build the next generation of AI: ubiquitous, interactive intelligence that runs wherever you are. Today, not even the best models can continuously process and reason over a year-long stream of audio, video and text—1B text tokens, 10B audio tokens and 1T video tokens—let alone do this on-device.

We're pioneering the model architectures that will make this possible. Our founding team met as PhDs at the Stanford AI Lab, where we invented State Space Models or SSMs, a new primitive for training efficient, large-scale foundation models. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering paired with a design-minded product engineering team to build and ship cutting edge models and experiences.

We're funded by leading investors at Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with Factory, Conviction, A Star, General Catalyst, SV Angel, Databricks and others. We're fortunate to have the support of many amazing advisors, and 90+ angels across many industries, including the world's foremost experts in AI.

About the Role

Cartesia is hiring a Software Engineer, Databases to architect Cartesia’s data systems for the next orders of magnitude of scale, implement data governance, and empower engineers and non-engineers with easy, secure database tooling and access.

Your Impact

• Develop and evolve database platforms to support 100x+ scale while preserving strong guarantees around uptime, latency, and correctness

• Design data storage architectures that operate smoothly across AWS, GCP, on-prem / first-party infrastructure, third-party deployments, and additional environments

• Enable faster development across the company by providing engineers and non-engineers alike with high-quality, reliable database tooling and primitives

• Create and deploy secure access control mechanisms so sensitive data is only accessible by authorized users

• Build scalable data governance systems for permissions, auditing, and compliance (e.g., data residency), including IAM policies, ACLs, and security controls used across thousands of users and services

What You Bring

• Strong proficiency with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, along with infrastructure-as-code tooling like Terraform

• A track record of taking database systems through periods of extreme growth at fast-scaling organizations

• 4+ years of industry experience, including 2+ years owning or leading large, complex technical initiatives as an engineer or tech lead

• Deep hands-on experience operating and scaling databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB, or comparable systems

• Experience designing and running database infrastructure in multi-cloud or hybrid environments

• Familiarity with database automation, orchestration, and operational tooling at significant scale

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience working with Redis, Temporal, vector databases, or asynchronous/background job systems

• Strong understanding of database internals and data systems — including storage engines, indexing, query execution, and related topics — is a bonus but not required

• Previous experience at organizations with a strong reputation for database or data-infrastructure engineering

What We Offer

🍽 Lunch, dinner and snacks at the office.

🏥 Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees.

🏦 401(k).

✈️ Relocation and immigration support.

🦖 Your own personal Yoshi.

Our Culture

🏢 We’re an in-person team based out of San Francisco. We love being in the office, hanging out together, and learning from each other every day.

🚢 We ship fast. All of our work is novel and cutting edge, and execution speed is paramount. We have a high bar, and we don’t sacrifice quality or design along the way.

🤝 We support each other. We have an open & inclusive culture that’s focused on giving everyone the resources they need to succeed.