Senior Open Source Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: HQ

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

Employment Type: FullTime

About LanceDB

LanceDB is a developer-friendly, open-source database for multimodal AI. From hyper-scalable vector search to advanced retrieval for RAG, from streaming training data to interactive exploration of large-scale AI datasets, LanceDB is the best foundation for your AI application, and powers some of the most groundbreaking applications and challenging requirements today.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Open Source Engineer to help expand the reach of Lance and LanceDB within the broader data infrastructure ecosystem. You’ll work at the intersection of high-performance computing, big data, and open-source systems—driving integrations, improving distributed operations, and contributing to projects across the Apache and AI communities.

You’ll be responsible for

• Driving open-source community efforts to integrate the Lance format with Spark, Hive Metastore, Presto, Trino, Ray, and other data infrastructure systems

• Designing and maintaining efficient distributed Lance dataset operations

• Building efficient indices to enable predicate pushdown and accelerate queries in Spark, Ray, or Trino

• Working on table formats, data encodings, and various aspects of the Lance format in Rust

• Operating and improving internal data processing infrastructure

• Promoting the Lance format in open-source communities and at Big Data conferences

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building high-performance databases, big data systems, or large-scale data services

• Deep understanding of internals of open-source Big Data or AI training systems (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Flink, Ray, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, ClickHouse, Trino, Presto, PyTorch, or JAX)

• Strong experience with high-performance computing in Java or Scala

• Experience with Rust (or willingness to learn it)

• Proven ability to move fast, work independently, and collaborate with a high-caliber team

Nice to Have

• Contributor, committer, or PMC member in Apache or other large open-source projects

• Experience with Java, Rust, C++, Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Parquet, Iceberg, or Delta Lake

• Track record of driving large features or integrations in distributed systems

• Strong community presence and passion for open-source collaboration

What We Offer

• A key role shaping an open-source project with real production usage

• Remote-first team with flexible hours

• Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits

• Generous learning budget and support for open-source contributions

Why Join Us

You’ll join a world-class team of open-source builders (co-authors of pandas, and contributors to HDFS, Arrow, Iceberg, and HBase) working on cutting-edge AI infrastructure. You’ll collaborate on systems that power next-generation AI workloads while shaping how LanceDB operates and scales production environments.