Director of Engineering, Core Database

Location: Sunnyvale, CA

Department: Technology

Director of Engineering, Core Database

Yugabyte is seeking an experienced and accomplished Director of Engineering to lead key aspects of our distributed SQL database development. This leader will drive the architecture, development, and delivery of core transactional, storage, and distributed systems components, ensuring YugabyteDB maintains industry-leading performance, scalability, and resilience. They will also manage and mentor our growing team.

This role requires a mix of software architecture expertise to design and implement practical solutions, as well as the ability to work closely with developers to identify patterns and tools that simplify solution building. You will lead one or more critical engineering teams focused on the heart of YugabyteDB, bringing technical depth in database internals and distributed systems to mentor and grow a world-class engineering organization.

This position demands a blend of hands-on architectural expertise, large-scale systems design, and the ability to execute against an ambitious product roadmap, with a deep understanding of transactional databases, distributed systems, and microservice-based applications.

Role and Responsibilities

• Technical Strategy & Architecture: Define and drive the technical roadmap and architecture for core database components, including the storage engine (LSM/RocksDB), transactional layer, distributed consensus (RAFT), and multi-master replication (xCluster).

• Engineering Execution: Own the end-to-end development, quality, performance, and operational excellence of your teams' components, ensuring deployment in cloud-native environments (e.g., Kubernetes).

• Team Leadership & Mentorship: Recruit, mentor, and manage high-performing engineering teams. Foster a culture of deep technical ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

• Systems Scaling & Reliability: Lead projects focused on write scaling, improving concurrency (e.g., DDL concurrency), ensuring cache coherency, and achieving 99.995% availability in distributed, multi-tenant, cloud-native environments.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Product Management, Technical Leadership (TDs/CTO), and other engineering teams (Query Optimizer, QA) to define requirements and deliver integrated, impactful features.

Required Experience

The ideal candidate will have demonstrated senior leadership in domains directly applicable to distributed databases:

• Experience: 10+ years of progressive software development experience, with at least 3+ years in a Director role managing multiple teams or critical product areas.

• Database Internals Expertise: Substantial experience designing and developing core components of production-grade relational or distributed database engines (e.g., storage/access layer, buffer cache, logging, recovery, lock management, indexing, LSM).

• Distributed Systems & Cloud-Native Architectures: Proven ability to design and deliver internet-scale, highly available, multi-tenant distributed systems, leveraging technologies such as Service Fabric, distributed lock managers, distributed transaction managers, and cloud object storage.

• Core Programming Languages: Hands-on experience in systems programming languages, particularly C/C++ and Go.

• Scalability and Performance: Direct experience resolving performance bottlenecks (e.g., range scans, nested loop joins) and re-architecting systems for massive scaling (e.g., separating log/data, multi-writer architectures).

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• YugabyteDB/PostgreSQL: Experience with PostgreSQL internals or PostgreSQL-compatible distributed databases.

• Cloud & Kubernetes: Hands-on experience with modern public cloud infrastructure and cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and Prometheus.

• NoSQL Databases: Familiarity with NoSQL databases.

• Open Source & Research: Contributions to open-source database projects, patents, or successfully integrating research concepts (e.g., ML-based anomaly detection) into products.

• Data Technologies: Experience with technologies common in the Yugabyte ecosystem, such as Apache Bookkeeper, Spark, Kafka, or other NoSQL/Graph databases (e.g., Neo4J).

We work in a hybrid model, with the team together in our Sunnyvale office 2–3 days per week.

We feel strongly about equal pay for equal work, and transparency in compensation is one way to help achieve that. The cash compensation for this role is market competitive, with a range of USD 220,000-USD 250,000, inclusive of variable/incentive for some roles. As well as equity (when applicable), and benefits including health plans, retirement plans, and unlimited paid time off (PTO). The pay range for this position is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. The actual pay will vary based on factors including experience, qualifications, and skill level.

Due to the Proclamation, “Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers”, which went into effect on September 21, 2025, at this time we are no longer able to sponsor new H-1B visa petitions filed after September 21, 2025 for new hires. We are still able to consider candidates who require H-1B extensions, changes of employer, or other types of work authorization.

#LI-Hybrid