Senior Staff Engineer: Distributed DB & HPC

Circana; Chicago, Northern (IL, KY); Hybrid; USD 114,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) plan

Bonus pay

Job summary

Circana in Chicago, IL seeks a Senior Staff Engineer to design and evolve our massively parallel processing database kernel (Whitebox) powering real-time analytics for clients in 22+ countries. You will bridge HPC and Big Data, optimize for multi-core CPUs and SIMD, and enable in-database ML for terabyte/petabyte-scale datasets.

You’ll lead low-level development, architecture reviews, and cross‑functional collaboration across time zones.

Qualifications

• 4+ year CS degree; masters in HPC or big data preferred for senior roles.
• Expert in modern C++ (C++17/20/23) and template metaprogramming.
• Strong MPI/OpenMP distributed programming experience.
• In-depth knowledge of HPC, SIMD, and low-latency systems.
• Experience with database internals and vectorized query operators.

Responsibilities

• Architect and design distributed database kernel and query engines.
• Implement high-performance backend code in C++20/23.
• Plan parallel execution across many nodes using MPI/OpenMP.
• Profile, optimize, and ensure cache locality and SIMD utilization.
• Design low-latency network subsystems (RDMA/DPDK).
• Build in-database ML framework and vector storage subsystems.
• Lead architecture reviews and cross-functional collaboration.

Skills

C++ programming

MPI

OpenMP

Distributed systems

Low latency

Performance tuning

In-database ML

Vectorization

Database internals

HPC

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS

Master's in HPC

Tools

Valgrind

Perf tools

CUDA

RocksDB

DPDK

Job description

Circana in Chicago, IL seeks a Senior Staff Engineer to design and evolve our massively parallel processing database kernel (Whitebox) powering real-time analytics for clients in 22+ countries. You will bridge HPC and Big Data, optimize for multi-core CPUs and SIMD, and enable in-database ML for terabyte/petabyte-scale datasets.

You’ll lead low-level development, architecture reviews, and cross‑functional collaboration across time zones.