Senior Systems Engineer, Database

Job description

ABOUT ANTITHESIS We've been quietly reinventing how the world thinks about software reliability, and we're just getting started! At Antithesis, we start at the foundations – we run entire software systems inside a deterministic simulation and break them in every way imaginable. Every issue then comes with a perfect reproduction, so you can identify root causes fast instead of spending days trying to recreate what went wrong. The rise of AI-generated code has made this work more urgent than ever. Agents can write code faster than any human, but speed doesn't matter much when the output is buggy, stuck in review, or slipping through undetected. The verification bottleneck is real, it's growing, and solving it is one of the most consequential problems in software right now. That's what you'd be working on. We're well-funded and deeply technical, the kind of place where the hardest problems get the most attention and the best ideas win regardless of who has them. If you want to do work that actually moves the needle on how reliable software can be, keep reading. ABOUT THE ROLE Pangolin is Antithesis's custom streaming analytics database — the backbone of how our customers interact with and make sense of their data. It's built around a native tree structure that scales to over a billion nodes, supports ACID transactions, and lets customers define arbitrarily complex queries through JavaScript UDFs. Under the hood: disaggregated storage and compute, Lambda-based processing, and S3-backed storage — a modern architecture built from scratch rather than inherited. It ingests and queries terabytes of customer data daily, and it does it fast. If you've ever read about a database limitation and thought that's a solvable problem, this is the place. We're a small team working on genuinely unsolved problems: on-disk storage formats, query optimization, cross-table joins, and increasingly interactive data experiences. Pangolin is directly wired into the product — the notebook team builds on top of it, customers feel every improvement — so the work is real and the feedback loop is tight. If you've thought deeply about how databases actually work and have the itch to build one that's better, this is the role. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build and evolve Pangolin, our bespoke analytical database — a tree-native, streaming system handling terabytes of customer data daily. - Work closely with internal customers — including the notebook/UI team — to define priorities, shape the roadmap, and deliver features that make data exploration faster and more fluid. - Collaborate with the broader Infrastructure team on deployment, reliability, and scale. - Write clean, well-reasoned design docs and contribute to the long-term technical direction of the system. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR We want engineers who think carefully about performance and correctness, take ownership of systems end to end, and are energized by working directly with the people who use what they build. - Strong proficiency in Rust; safe, performant, idiomatic code is second nature to you. - Deep systems programming fundamentals — you can reason about memory, concurrency, and performance from first principles. - Strong CS fundamentals in data structures and algorithms, with a habit of solving hard problems from the ground up. - Strong backend engineering background; you've worked on or alongside database systems and understand what makes them tick — the more depth, the better. - Product-minded: comfortable talking to internal customers, translating fuzzy requirements into concrete priorities, and owning delivery. Bonus: - Experience building, operating, or maintaining large-scale distributed backend systems; deep performance optimization experience; Linux internals; V8; AWS (S3 & Lambda). ABOUT OUR TEAM Our team spans CS degrees, philosophy, mathematics, and everything in between, or nothing formal at all. What everyone shares is a high bar for engineering quality. We work in-person because it's how we build trust and tackle hard problems together. Location: This position is 5 days in office in Vienna, VA or San Francisco, CA