Software Engineer, SmithDB

Langchain; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Flexible vacation

401(k) plan

Meals on in-office days

Job summary

Langchain is hiring a Systems/Database Engineer based in San Francisco. The ideal candidate will have over 5 years of experience in systems/database engineering, with strong Rust programming skills. The role involves engineering efficient code for ingestion and query execution, optimizing performance, and deploying distributed database services. Compensation ranges from $175,000 to $240,000 USD, alongside competitive benefits including medical, dental, and flexible vacation.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in systems/database engineering, strong experience in Rust preferred.
• Knowledge of database internals like query engines and storage systems.
• Proficiency in systems performance analysis including memory allocation.

Responsibilities

• Engineer performant Rust code for ingestion and query execution.
• Optimize for cost and speed using memory and CPU profiling.
• Deploy distributed database services on Kubernetes.

Skills

Systems programming (Rust, C++)

Database internals knowledge

Systems performance analysis

Kubernetes

Distributed systems

Cloud object storage

Job description

About Us

At LangChain, our mission is to make intelligent agents ubiquitous. We build the foundation for agent engineering in the real world, helping developers move from prototypes to production‑ready AI agents that teams can rely on. We began as widely adopted open‑source tools and have grown to also offer a platform for building, evaluating, deploying, and operating agents at scale.

With $125M raised at Series B from IVP, Sequoia, Benchmark, CapitalG, and Sapphire Ventures, we’re at a stage where we’re continuing to develop new products, growth is accelerating, and all team members have meaningful impact on what we build and how we work together. LangChain is a place where your contributions can shape how this technology shows up in the real world.

Today, LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, and Fleet are used by teams shipping real AI products across startups and large enterprises. Millions of developers trust LangChain to power AI teams at companies like Replit, Clay, Coinbase, Workday, Lyft, Cloudflare, Harvey, Rippling, Vanta, and 35% of the Fortune 500.

About the role

We're building a storage layer specifically designed for AI observability and evaluation. We're a fast‑moving team looking for a systems / database engineer to help design, optimize, and harden our system. Within 6 months, we've gone from idea to production system but there is still lots to build and optimize. You'll be working on execution, storage layout, performance profiling, and scaling to trillions of traces. This role is based in San Francisco.

What you'll do

• Engineer performant Rust code for ingestion and query execution
• Optimize for cost and speed, heavily utilizing memory and CPU profiling
• Integrate tightly with cloud object stores (S3/GCS/Azure Blob)
• Deploy our distributed database services on Kubernetes (multi‑tenant, high throughput, low latency)
• Contribute to observability for the storage engine itself (metrics, tracing, debug tooling)

What you'll bring

• 5+ years in systems/database engineering with strong experience in a systems programming language (Rust, C++). Rust strongly preferred, as it is the language we use.
• Knowledge of database internals is a plus: query engines, storage systems, indexing, and compaction
• Proficiency in systems performance analysis: memory allocation, CPU hotspots, lock contention, async runtimes.
• Familiarity with similar query execution engines is a plus
• Experience with Kubernetes, distributed systems, and cloud object storage is a plus.
• Strong fundamentals in networking, OS concepts, and systems debugging.

Compensation

Salary Range: $175,000-$240,000 USD

Compensation Philosophy

We offer competitive compensation that includes base salary, variable compensation for relevant roles, meaningful equity, benefits, and perks. Actual compensation and offerings will vary based on role, level, and location. Team members in the EU, UK, and APAC receive locally competitive benefits aligned with regional norms and regulations.

Benefits

Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, flexible vacation, a 401(k) plan, meals on in-office days in the US and more.