Senior Staff Engineer: Hybrid HPC/DB Kernel

Circana; United States; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus pay

Medical/dental/vision insurance

401(k)

Paid time off

Job summary

Circana is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to drive the evolution of a high-performance, massively parallel processing database engine that powers large-scale retail analytics. You will bridge HPC and big data, delivering low-latency kernels on multi-core, vectorized hardware and distributed networks.

You will contribute to architecture, implement production-grade backend code, and optimize performance across clusters, with opportunities to mentor others and influence platform capabilities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS; Master's in HPC/Big Data preferred for senior roles.
• 8+ years of production experience in C++ (C++17/20/23).
• Experience with MPI, OpenMP, and MapReduce frameworks.
• Hardware-aware optimization and SIMD intrinsics knowledge.
• Strong debugging, performance tuning, and problem-solving skills.
• Familiarity with distributed database internals and large-scale systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect core kernels and roadmap for a distributed database engine.
• Write and optimize backend C++ code for low latency and high throughput.
• Design MPP execution plans across many nodes using MPI/OpenMP.
• Profile and optimize with SIMD/vectorization and cache locality.
• Develop ultra-low latency cluster communications and DP/DMA paths.
• Build in-database ML framework to reduce data movement.
• Lead architecture reviews and mentor peers; resolve scale challenges.

Skills

MPI

OpenMP

C++ optimization

Debugging

Performance tuning

Distributed systems

Algorithm design

Education

Bachelor's in Computer Science

Master's in HPC/Big Data

Tools

C++ (C++20/23)

Job description

Circana is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to drive the evolution of a high-performance, massively parallel processing database engine that powers large-scale retail analytics. You will bridge HPC and big data, delivering low-latency kernels on multi-core, vectorized hardware and distributed networks.

You will contribute to architecture, implement production-grade backend code, and optimize performance across clusters, with opportunities to mentor others and influence platform capabilities.