Senior Platform Engineer: AI Data & Distributed DBs

Ambient.ai; Redwood City (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health benefits

Flexible time off

In-person collaboration at Redwood CIy

Job summary

Ambient.ai is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to design, build, and scale the database platform that powers its production and AI systems. You will work at the intersection of databases, distributed systems, and AI infrastructure to scale relational, analytical, and vector data stores.

The role requires deep experience with partitioning, sharding, replication, indexing, caching, and query optimization. You will partner with AI teams to support embeddings, vector search, and analytics in a

Qualifications

• 7+ years in database infrastructure or production platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience operating scalable production databases.
• Deep PostgreSQL/MySQL/Aurora/CockroachDB expertise.
• Experience with analytical stores (ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift).
• Experience with vector stores and vector search systems.
• Strong understanding of partitioning, sharding, replication, indexing, caching.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate scalable database infrastructure for production/AI systems.
• Scale relational, analytical, and vector data stores for growing workloads.
• Improve database performance across latency, throughput, availability, and cost.
• Own architecture decisions around partitioning, sharding, replication, and caching.
• Operate tier-0 data services with strong reliability and incident response.
• Develop automation for provisioning, migrations, monitoring, backups, and capacity planning.
• Collaborate with AI teams on embeddings, vector search, and analytics.
• Build data-serving patterns for low latency AI features.
• Design scalable data access patterns with engineering teams.
• Identify bottlenecks and drive cross-layer improvements.
• Define best practices for schema design and data lifecycle management.
• Help evolve long-term data platform strategy as the company scales.

Skills

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Aurora

CockroachDB

Vitess

ClickHouse

BigQuery

Snowflake

Redshift

Vector databases

pgvector

Pinecone

Milvus

OpenSearch

Partitioning

Sharding

Replication

Caching

Query optimization

Low latency

Redis

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD

Python

Go

C++

Cloud infrastructure

Observability

SLOs

Incident response

Tools

PostgreSQL tooling

Aurora tooling

CockroachDB tooling

Vitess tooling

Job description

Ambient.ai is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to design, build, and scale the database platform that powers its production and AI systems. You will work at the intersection of databases, distributed systems, and AI infrastructure to scale relational, analytical, and vector data stores.

The role requires deep experience with partitioning, sharding, replication, indexing, caching, and query optimization. You will partner with AI teams to support embeddings, vector search, and analytics in a