Lead Rust Database Engineer - Open Source & Cloud

Spiceai; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Spiceai is seeking a Rust Software Engineer to lead database development across Spice.ai open-source and cloud platforms. Design and implement high-performance database engine features and contribute to scalable data systems.

You will collaborate with founders and enterprise customers, own feature areas over time, and drive improvements early in onboarding while delivering excellent developer experiences.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of professional Rust experience or 5+ years of professional C/C++ experience.
• Proven experience designing, implementing, scaling, and shipping production database engines and distributed data systems.
• Track record of strong design, architectural, engineering, and product decisions.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to ramp up quickly and hit the ground running.
• Passion for high performance and high standards.
• Experience contributing to open‑source projects.
• Familiarity with Apache infrastructure, the CNCF stack, or cloud‑native development.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and unknowns, leading by creating clarity.
• Positive mindset that focuses on possibility rather than limitations.
• A mindset that values meaningful work and pushes beyond the status quo.
• Problem‑solving approach that starts with customer problems and builds technology solutions.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-performance database engine features in Spice.ai, Apache DataFusion, Apache Ballista, Arrow, Iceberg, Vortex, and duckdb-rs.
• Work side-by-side with the founders as a leader and outstanding contributor in the Spice.ai open-source project.
• Contribute to designing and building the Spice.ai Cloud Platform.
• Take ownership of initiatives to improve our offerings and deliver exceptional developer experiences.
• Work directly with enterprise customers and build with them to enable their scenarios.
• Lead technical and engineering ownership of feature areas over time.
• Deliver bug fixes and improvements early in the onboarding process.

Skills

Rust

C/C++

Database engines

Distributed data systems

Open-source contributions

Communication

Cloud-native

Apache/CNCF stack

Ambiguity tolerance

Customer-focused

Problem solving

Job description

Spiceai is seeking a Rust Software Engineer to lead database development across Spice.ai open-source and cloud platforms. Design and implement high-performance database engine features and contribute to scalable data systems.

You will collaborate with founders and enterprise customers, own feature areas over time, and drive improvements early in onboarding while delivering excellent developer experiences.