Founding Software Engineer

PgDog; Oregon (WI); On-site; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health & dental, fully covered

Unlimited PTO

Social activities in SF Bay Area

Job summary

PgDog in Wisconsin is seeking a jack of all trades to join their team. In this role, you'll work primarily with Rust and Postgres, contributing to the development of a distributed database from scratch. You'll address bugs, design features, and engage directly with customers. The company provides a dynamic startup environment and offers competitive compensation ranging from $150k to $220k along with equity. You will also enjoy benefits such as health and dental insurance and unlimited PTO.

Qualifications

• Experience coding in Rust, with a strong understanding of Postgres.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and distributed systems.
• Detail-oriented with a focus on testing and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Fix bugs and ship new features from day one.
• Contribute to all aspects of coding and customer relations.
• Design and contribute to the development roadmap.

Skills

Rust

Postgres

Kubernetes

Networking

Distributed systems

Debugging

Job description

Overview

PgDog is a tiny database startup in SF. We’re scaling the world’s most popular database, PostgreSQL. PgDog is in production, used by dozens of companies, large and small. The problem is big, but so is the opportunity, and we’re hiring!

About The Role

The jack of all trades. Rust, Postgres, infrastructure (you don’t mind Kubernetes too much), networking, distributed systems, and so much more. You’ll build features that will go directly into our customers hands, the day you ship them.

With great power comes great responsibility, of course. You’re meticulous, detail-oriented and are not afraid to take calculated risks. You write tests because you want to make sure the thing works, not to check a box. You’re not afraid to run code in production, on real data; after all, that’s the only way to know something works.

Roadmap

First week: You’ll fix a bug or ship a cool feature. We’ll give it to one of our users or customers to try right away.

First month: You’ll get acquainted with pretty much all of our code. You’ll start coming up with your own bug fixes and features.

Three months later: You’re designing our roadmap. You’re contributing to everything we’re doing: coding, talking with customers, and even finding us more! Things we badly want to build:

• Advanced OLAP query engine. People don’t like to rewrite their queries, so let’s make them just work with sharded Postgres. If you’re wondering how much work that is, check out the Postgres SQL reference. All of it has to work!
• In-place data redistribution: let’s make Postgres scale like Cassandra/Elastic. Having the ability to dynamically shard would be super cool and make it a push-button op.

Day to day

Mostly digging through the Postgres manual and building a distributed database, from scratch, using first principles (and as many Wikipedia articles as you need). Everything is written in Rust, so that makes it easier, honestly. Type-safe, “fearless concurrency”, and an awesome open source ecosystem where you can find pretty much everything we’ll need.

Time split is going to be something like 30% bug fixes, 60% new features, 10% infra glue. Use as much (or as little) AI as you want. I use Claude a lot, and it’s been pretty helpful overall, especially for debugging what is now over 100k lines of code.

Backstory

I did this at Instacart back in 2020. Grew the company 5x in a few months, just by making Postgres do things it wasn’t built for. My key insight: if you make the database you already have just work, people love it. Nobody wants to migrate to Dynamo, seriously.

I’ve been coding in Rust for close to 10 years, even wrote my own web framework for fun. PgDog started as “something to do” while I was unemployed; one year later, it’s mission-critical infra for some pretty serious people, so that’s cool.

Compensation

• 150k-220k / year
• 1-3% equity

Perks

• Health & dental, fully covered
• Unlimited PTO
• If you’re in SF Bay Area: coffee, dinner, hikes, bike rides, etc.; I’m always down to hang out! We can also walk my giant 90 pound dog (and now you know where the name “PgDog” comes from).