Senior Vector DB Engineer - AI-Native, Cloud-Scale

Zilliz; Redwood City (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Regular bonus and equity refresh

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Paid time off and wellbeing days

401(k) and regional retirement plans

Job summary

Zilliz is hiring a seasoned software engineer to design and build core modules of Milvus and Vector Lakebase, including storage, query engine, indexing, and distributed execution, in a fast-growing startup environment. You will drive the evolution of engine architecture, bring Lake-native capabilities and elastic scaling into production, and support large-scale multi-tenancy for AI applications.

Collaborate with cloud platform and product teams, contribute to open-source Milvus, and mentor peers

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience building database systems, distributed systems, storage engines, query engines, search systems, or large-scale data infrastructure.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong systems programming ability in one or more of C++, Go, or Rust.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and database internals, including consistency, scalability, performance, fault tolerance, query execution, storage, indexing, resource management, and engineering tradeoffs.
• Open-source contributions in databases, storage, search, Kubernetes, or distributed systems are a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core modules of Milvus and Vector Lakebase, including storage, query engine, indexing, load balancing, resource management, and distributed execution
• Drive the evolution of the engine architecture, bringing Lake-native capabilities, elastic scaling, and large-scale multi-tenancy into production to support the next stage of growth
• Design database capabilities for AI and Agent workloads, handling more complex access patterns, higher concurrency, larger scale, and lower latency
• Own the stability of Zilliz Cloud, working closely with cloud platform and product engineering teams to bring engine capabilities into production and using real customer scenarios to drive engine improvements
• Iterate on AI developer tooling, bringing AI into the engineering workflow to improve team velocity and system observability
• Contribute to the Milvus open-source community through design docs, code, code reviews, and technical discussions

Skills

Distributed systems

C++/Go/Rust

Database internals

Performance optimization

Cloud-native architectures

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Software Engineering or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Zilliz is hiring a seasoned software engineer to design and build core modules of Milvus and Vector Lakebase, including storage, query engine, indexing, and distributed execution, in a fast-growing startup environment. You will drive the evolution of engine architecture, bring Lake-native capabilities and elastic scaling into production, and support large-scale multi-tenancy for AI applications.

Collaborate with cloud platform and product teams, contribute to open-source Milvus, and mentor peers