database engineer

turbopuffer

23h

About The Position

Turbopuffer is looking for database engineers who want to advance the frontier of search. This role involves designing and implementing improvements across various layers of their search engine, including storage, indexing, and querying. A significant part of the job includes intensive performance hacking, such as tracing, CPU/heap profiling, optimizing data structures, using SIMD, and tuning IO pipelines. The engineer will also evolve search primitives and APIs, encompassing full text, vector, and reranking capabilities. Additionally, the role requires close collaboration with customers to understand and win their workloads, and to integrate these learnings back into the product. Writing clear documentation is also a key responsibility.

Requirements

• Systems engineering experience
• Extensive experience in a systems language (Rust, C++, Java, Go, etc.)
• Understanding of memory layouts, cache lines, and syscalls
• Methodical problem-solving approach
• Expertise 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), or distributed systems (e.g., replication, leases, fault injection, simulation/chaos testing)
• Proficiency in Linux environments, including terminals, eBPF/perf, strace, gdb
• Strong writing and communication skills to explain complex ideas simply
• Ability to build trust and admit knowledge gaps

Nice To Haves

• Multiple years of experience writing Rust
• Experience maintaining or operating serious systems in production, at scale
• 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)
• Additional domain expertise in security (multi-tenant systems, isolation, sandboxing)

Responsibilities

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed