database engineer

Department: R&D

Location: US, Canada

Employment Type: FullTime

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)

values we live by:

• overstep > understep

• correctness > simplicity > performance

• customer traces > first principles > hunches

• show > tell