Remote Principal Database Infrastructure Engineer

IronGrid Data Services; United States; On-site; USD 190,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity participation included

Discretionary PTO

Medical benefits

Retirement plan (401k)

HSA & FSA

Phone & internet reimbursement

Commuter benefits

Parental leave

Job summary

VideoAmp is seeking a Principal Database Infrastructure Engineer to design and own scalable data systems powering the platform. You will guide distributed query execution, storage/caching, and performance engineering in a high-impact IC role.

Requirements include 8+ years in database infra or data platforms, strong systems programming (Rust/C++/Go) and experience with DataFusion or similar SQL planners, Iceberg, and Kubernetes. Remote US work option available.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering with deep database infra or data platform experience.
• Proficiency in Rust, or strong C++/Go with a path to Rust including async runtimes like Tokio.
• Experience building/disputing distributed data systems with shuffles, partitioning, memory bottlenecks.
• Fluency with Arrow/Parquet and vectorized execution and performance characteristics.
• Strong grounding in distributed systems: consistent hashing, leader/heartbeat, backpressure, graceful degradation.
• Performance-minded: profile before optimizing with benchmark evidence.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement the physical plan distribution path, including network shuffle, coalesce, and partition isolator insertion; manage plan serialization and data exchange paths.
• Own worker discovery/heartbeats and develop load balancing concepts like work-stealing and replication-aware hash rings.
• Work on cost-based join reordering, bloom filter cascades, scan deduplication, and selectivity estimation; contribute to DataFusion fork and upstream where appropriate.
• Own NVMe LRU cache over S3, Parquet read strategies, and Iceberg pruning/snapshots.
• Close remaining gaps in query performance, including multi-shuffle plans and redistribution after scalar-subquery extraction; target Snowflake parity.

Skills

Distributed systems

Systems programming

Query optimization

Columnar formats

Benchmarking

Performance mindset

Tools

Rust

C++

Go

DataFusion

Apache Iceberg

Kubernetes

Job description

VideoAmp is seeking a Principal Database Infrastructure Engineer to design and own scalable data systems powering the platform. You will guide distributed query execution, storage/caching, and performance engineering in a high-impact IC role.

Requirements include 8+ years in database infra or data platforms, strong systems programming (Rust/C++/Go) and experience with DataFusion or similar SQL planners, Iceberg, and Kubernetes. Remote US work option available.