database engineer

Job description

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