Software Engineer, Superhuman Database Infrastructure

Superhuman • Seattle, WA

1d • $163,500 - $284,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Superhuman offers a dynamic hybrid working model for this role. This flexible approach gives team members the best of both worlds: plenty of focus time along with in-person collaboration that helps foster trust, innovation, and a strong team culture.
About Superhuman
Grammarly is now part of Superhuman, the AI productivity platform on a mission to unlock the superhuman potential in everyone. The Superhuman suite of apps and agents brings AI wherever people work, integrating with over 1 million applications and websites. The company’s products include Grammarly’s writing assistance, Coda’s collaborative workspaces, Mail’s inbox management, and Go, the proactive AI assistant that understands context and delivers help automatically. Founded in 2009, Superhuman empowers over 40 million people, 50,000 organizations, and 3,000 educational institutions worldwide to eliminate busywork and focus on what matters. Learn more at superhuman.com and about our values here.
The Opportunity
We're looking for a Software Engineer to join the Platform team within Superhuman Docs. This is an opportunity to work on and grow into a technical leadership role on the foundation that powers every table, grid, and view on the platform.
Superhuman Docs is where teams build living documents that replace scattered tools with a single, flexible surface. At the heart of this experience is the table the building block that makes a doc feel like a real application. Tables aren't passive containers they support rich filtering, a diverse and extendable set of data types, multi-column sorts and groupings, external database sync, and relational dependencies. Every cell change flows through a distributed sync engine and must land consistent across every collaborator, view, and dependent formula.
This problem is harder than building a general-purpose database because of who the users are. Our customers aren't database administrators — they're teams who opened a doc to build a tracker or CRM and ended up running a real application. That means managing an enormous number of distinct databases — most of which go cold over time but none of which we can delete — requiring cost-aware architectural choices. We have to support enterprise-grade encryption that the major cloud providers don't offer out of the box. We need a system that stays performant under access patterns that can shift at any moment — and invisible to customers who shouldn't have to think about any of it. Optimizing for a known workload is a solved problem. This isn't that.

Requirements

• 8+ years of industry experience and at least 5 of those working on relevant technologies.
• Has deep experience building or substantially contributing to the internals of a storage or database system — query execution, index management, storage engines, or transaction/consistency layers in systems like PostgreSQL, MySQL, RocksDB, SQLite, or comparable infrastructure.
• Understands the tradeoffs in data layout, serialization formats, and access patterns at a level that goes beyond API usage — you've made decisions about how data is actually stored and retrieved under the hood.
• Has shipped and operated storage-layer systems where correctness under concurrency is non-negotiable — you understand read/write ordering, invalidation hazards, and what "consistent" actually means in a distributed setting.
• Understands write-ahead logging, crash recovery, and checkpoint strategies — and the tradeoffs between write amplification, recovery time, and storage overhead when designing for durability.
• Brings strong instincts for performance engineering and cost-aware design: profiling storage operations, reasoning about cache behavior, identifying hot paths, and making principled tradeoffs between performance and operational cost at scale.
• Can work across a large, complex system — the tables layer touches the sync engine, the formula runtime, the client-side rendering layer, and external APIs; you're comfortable reasoning about correctness and performance across those boundaries.
• Demonstrates the instinct to simplify — the existing system carries real complexity and this role requires knowing when to work within it and when to step back and rethink the architecture.
• Communicates clearly and influences across engineering, product, and platform — foundational infrastructure work requires building alignment, not just writing good code.
• Is energized by the unusual challenge of building a flexible, general-purpose database for non-technical users — where success means it's invisible, affordable, secure, and fast for any workload a customer brings to it.
• Has experience with query planning and execution — understanding how to evaluate filter predicates, select indexes, and push operations closer to the storage layer to avoid full scans and unnecessary data

Nice To Haves

• Has thought seriously about the challenge of unpredictable, variable workloads — designing storage systems that perform well across a wide distribution of access patterns, not just a single optimized use case.
• Has experience with encryption at the storage layer, particularly multi-tenant or per-customer key isolation schemes — or strong familiarity with the concepts and a track record of learning adjacent domains quickly.
• Has experience with collaborative or distributed systems that require eventual consistency or conflict resolution — OT, CRDT, or comparable approaches are a plus, though deep understanding of the consistency problem matters more than familiarity with any specific mechanism.
• Full stack experience optimizing Typescript that runs both on the client and server.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to — and grow into technical leadership on — the structured data storage layer, including cell storage, row ordering, index management, view materialization, and query execution.
• Help drive improvements to how the platform handles large, complex tables at scale: lazy hydration strategies, data compaction, cache invalidation, and the lifecycle of cell data through the sync pipeline.
• Work on server-side query planning for database-backed tables — pushing filter, sort, and grouping operations closer to the data layer and away from the client.
• Collaborate with the formula engine and sync teams to ensure correctness at the boundaries: formula dependency tracking, column state transitions, and consistent view state across concurrent operations.
• Contribute to performance benchmarking and profiling practices for table operations, giving the team observable data to drive storage and query optimization decisions.
• Raise the technical bar across the team — reviewing designs, mentoring engineers, and bringing database internals thinking to problems the team is actively working through.
• Help define how structured data evolves on Superhuman Docs — anticipating the demands of cold storage tiers, per-tenant encryption at scale, unpredictable access patterns, and the flexibility requirements of a general-purpose application platform.

Benefits

• Excellent health care (including a wide range of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and fertility benefits)
• Disability and life insurance options
• 401(k) and RRSP matching
• Paid parental leave
• 20 days of paid time off per year, 12 days of paid holidays per year, two floating holidays per year, and flexible sick time
• Generous stipends (including those for caregiving, pet care, wellness, your home office, and more)
• Annual professional development budget and opportunities

What This Job Offers

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