database engineer

About this role

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