Research Engineer: AI-Driven Database Systems

European Tech Recruit; City of Edinburgh; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

European Tech Recruit is seeking a Database Systems Research Engineer to advance high-performance data management technologies. You will bridge systems research, software engineering and prototyping across database architecture and cloud AI data platforms.

You’ll work on kernels, optimisers, execution engines and storage, while exploring vector databases, knowledge graphs and AI-driven workloads with a global team in Edinburgh.

Qualifications

• MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related field.
• Strong background in database systems, distributed systems, OS, architecture or AI systems.
• Understanding of database internals: query processing, storage, indexing, transactions.
• Strong programming in C, C++, Rust or Go.
• Experience with system design, benchmarking and performance optimisation.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement database kernels, query optimisers, engines and indexing systems.
• Develop advanced query processing and optimisation for transactional, analytical and AI workloads.
• Research distributed and cloud-native database architectures: partitioning, replication and distributed execution.
• Develop storage and data management solutions for structured, multimodal and AI workloads.
• Explore AI data infrastructure including vector search, RAG, knowledge graphs and embeddings.

Skills

C/C++

Rust

Go

Distributed systems

Problem solving

Education

MSc or PhD in CS/EE or related

Tools

PostgreSQL

DuckDB

Spark

Flink

RocksDB

Job description

European Tech Recruit is seeking a Database Systems Research Engineer to advance high-performance data management technologies. You will bridge systems research, software engineering and prototyping across database architecture and cloud AI data platforms.

You’ll work on kernels, optimisers, execution engines and storage, while exploring vector databases, knowledge graphs and AI-driven workloads with a global team in Edinburgh.