Staff Software Engineer, Query Engine [Rust]

Komodo Health

3d • $196,000 - $265,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Komodo Health is seeking a Staff Software Engineer specializing in Query Engine development with Rust. This role is crucial for designing, building, and scaling Burrow, the query and indexing engine that powers Komodo's Healthcare Map. The Healthcare Map is the industry's largest and most comprehensive source of de-identified patient data, enabling powerful software applications to answer complex healthcare questions. The Data Foundations team, to which this role belongs, is a small, senior, hands-on team that builds with AI tools daily. The Staff Software Engineer will set technical direction for data storage, indexing, serving, and APIs, ensuring the Healthcare Map data remains fast, cost-efficient, and reliable at enterprise scale. This position offers the opportunity to build the core of Komodo's platform and contribute to a culture of technical excellence and transparency, using modern engineering and AI to tackle healthcare's biggest challenges.

Requirements

• Experience writing high-performance systems code in Rust (strongly preferred) or Erlang or C++, owning services end to end, including operating them in production.
• Deep knowledge of how analytical engines work under the hood: columnar formats (Parquet, Arrow), indexing and pruning (bloom filters, star-tree, and similar), compression and compaction, query planning and execution, and low-latency, high-RPS serving. Experience building on or extending engines such as Pinot, Druid, ClickHouse, DuckDB, DataFusion, or Trino.
• Demonstrated ability to design data models, serving patterns, platform components, and system architectures for complex, high-volume data environments.
• Track record of setting technical direction beyond your own team: leading design reviews, mentoring senior engineers, and driving multi-quarter architecture decisions across teams.
• Experience building query or serving infrastructure consumed by AI/ML systems, LLM-driven products, or high-volume real-time traffic.
• Comfort profiling and tuning distributed systems across memory, CPU, I/O and NVMe access patterns, caching, partitioning, and failure handling at fleet scale.
• Ability to explain technical decisions, trade-offs, risks, and delivery status clearly to engineers, product partners, data scientists, AI engineers, and senior stakeholders.
• Hands-on use of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, Claude, or similar to improve engineering productivity, design quality, testing, documentation, and decision-making. You'll actively experiment with new AI techniques, share learnings across teams, and contribute to Komodo's AI-first engineering culture.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with healthcare data, including claims, clinical, RWE, provider, patient, or life sciences data, and familiarity with coding systems such as ICD-10, CPT, NDC, RxNorm, NPI, or taxonomy data.
• Experience moving workloads off Redshift, Snowflake, or similar warehouses onto purpose-built serving infrastructure.
• Experience designing systems for large-volume data processing, productization, versioning, delivery, performance optimization, and cost efficiency, including newer columnar formats like Vortex.
• Experience using, designing, or integrating AI-enabled workflows — including LLM pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, prompt chains, or evaluation frameworks — to improve data quality, extraction, curation, or product delivery.
• Experience operating in high-growth or ambiguous environments where technical leaders must balance architecture, delivery, quality, and speed.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize Burrow's distributed query execution, indexing, and storage layers, powering customer-facing APIs, Komodo's software applications, and Marmot.
• Design the query APIs, semantic layer, and serving patterns that Komodo's AI products and agents depend on, partnering closely with Labs@Komodo.
• Design and implement high-performance data processing and serving patterns across large-scale healthcare datasets, with Rust as the primary language, alongside SQL, Python, DuckDB, or Spark where each is the right tool.
• Extend Burrow beyond patient-centric data, adding healthcare provider data and new query types such as provider-level trends and top-K analytics.
• Partner with upstream data engineering teams on how data enters Burrow, and with the products and platforms built on it, including Marmot, to deliver the APIs and queries they need.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, Labs@Komodo, Quality, Platform, and application teams to translate complex healthcare use cases into production-grade technical designs and execution plans.
• Lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives, making clear trade-offs across performance, scalability, maintainability, cost, reliability, and time-to-market.
• Define and implement data quality checks, validation frameworks, observability, lineage, monitoring, and alerting to ensure Healthcare Map products and AI-serving data are accurate, explainable, and reliable.
• Raise the bar for system design, code quality, documentation, testing, CI/CD, and operational readiness across the team, and mentor engineers through design reviews, technical deep dives, pairing, and architectural guidance, helping the team make better decisions at scale.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible time off and holidays
• 401(k) with company match
• Disability insurance
• Life insurance
• Leaves of absence in accordance with applicable state and local laws and regulations and company policy

What This Job Offers

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