database engineer

Turbopuffer; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

turbopuffer seeks database engineers to advance the frontier of search. You will design and implement improvements across storage, indexing, and querying layers, and perform performance hacking to optimize data structures, CPU/heap usage, and IO pipelines in a distributed system.

You will evolve search primitives and APIs (full text, vector, reranking), work with customers to run workloads, and write clear docs.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in a systems language (Rust/C++/Java/Go).
• Familiar with memory layouts, cache lines, and syscalls.
• Methodically diagnose root causes of problems.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement improvements across storage, indexing, and querying layers of the search engine.
• Intensive performance hacking: profiling, optimizing data structures, and IO pipelines.

Skills

Systems engineering

Rust

C++

Java

Go

Root cause analysis

Memory layouts

Linux

Technical writing

Problem solving

Domain expertise

Performance profiling

CPU/heap profiling

Tools

eBPF

perf

strace

gdb

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