Senior Support Engineer: Master Distributed DBs & Rust

LanceDB; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

LanceDB is seeking a hands-on Support Engineer to bridge our engineering team and enterprise users, debugging distributed databases built in Rust. You’ll shape our support infrastructure, create knowledge bases, and help scale a high-velocity support organization.

As an early member, you’ll troubleshoot escalations, collaborate with product and engineering, and dive into internals like sharding, replication, and cloud orchestration.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional experience in a support/operations/troubleshooting role in a distributed database or data infrastructure environment.
• Demonstrated experience with distributed database systems, cloud-native data platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and Kubernetes or serverless deployment models.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems concepts: sharding, replication, consensus, failure modes, resource contention, performance bottlenecks, and cloud-native orchestration (Kubernetes, containerization, autoscaling).
• Demonstrated experience with at least one of the following: vector/feature stores, analytics engines or big data systems.
• Very comfortable with reading logs and correlating them with source code, working with Grafana dashboards, and creating shell scripts or Python code to assist in debugging.
• Excellent customer-facing communication skills: you'll be working directly with high-value customers, so you must be comfortable explaining complex technical issues clearly, managing expectations, and advocating for the customer.
• Strong sense of ownership, urgency, correct prioritization under pressure, and ability to work closely with engineering teams to drive resolution.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving startup environment with high autonomy and evolving responsibilities.

Responsibilities

• Build our support infrastructure and practices while handling customer cases.
• Develop and maintain knowledge-base articles, runbooks, and support tooling documenting issues, best practices, deployment patterns, and performance tuning.
• Contribute to metrics around support response-times, resolution times, customer satisfaction, and help build a scalable support organization as we grow.
• Work proactively: identify recurring issues, elevate product bugs or UX gaps, propose improvements in the support process, and advocate for the customer in the roadmap.
• Serve as a primary technical contact for customers: troubleshoot issues, respond to escalations, and guide customers through full lifecycle support for large-scale deployments of LanceDB.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to reproduce issues, debug root causes, propose remediation, and drive fixes or enhancements.
• Dive into distributed database internals: query execution, storage engine, indexing, sharding, replication, fail-over, and cloud orchestration (Kubernetes, serverless-style deployments).
• Use and contribute to Rust codebases: reproduce customer environments, inspect logs, build diagnostic tools, run instrumentation, apply patches and configuration changes.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud-native data platforms

Kubernetes

Rust

Log analysis

Shell scripting

Customer communication

Tools

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Python

Job description

LanceDB is seeking a hands-on Support Engineer to bridge our engineering team and enterprise users, debugging distributed databases built in Rust. You’ll shape our support infrastructure, create knowledge bases, and help scale a high-velocity support organization.

As an early member, you’ll troubleshoot escalations, collaborate with product and engineering, and dive into internals like sharding, replication, and cloud orchestration.