Staff Engineer - Distributed DB Kernel & HPC

Circana; Chicago, Northern (IL, KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid time off

Medical/dental/vision insurance

401(k)

Job summary

Circana is seeking Staff Engineers to advance a massively parallel processing (MPP) clustered database engine used in real-time retail analytics. You will bridge HPC and data systems, building low-latency kernels for terabyte/petabyte datasets across distributed clusters.

You’ll design bare-metal software layers, exploit multi-core and vector hardware, and enable in-database ML inference with strong focus on performance and scalability.

Qualifications

• > 4 years CS engineering degree; advanced degrees preferred for senior roles.

Responsibilities

• Architecture & Design: contribute to core architectural choices for distributed DB kernel.
• Low-Level Development: write and optimize production-grade backend C++ code (C++20/23).
• Parallel Execution Planning: design MPI/OpenMP based execution across many nodes.
• Hardware Optimization: implement SIMD vectorization and ensure cache locality.
• Distributed Memory & Networks: design ultra-low latency cluster subsystems (RDMA/DPDK).
• In-Database ML Framework Design: build a native ML execution framework inside the engine.

Skills

C++

MPI

OpenMP

HPC

Distributed systems

Vectorization

Low-latency

RDMA

Networking

Education

Bachelors in CS

Masters in HPC & Big Data

Tools

Valgrind

Purify

Intel diagnostics

AMD diagnostics

ARM diagnostics

Job description

Circana is seeking Staff Engineers to advance a massively parallel processing (MPP) clustered database engine used in real-time retail analytics. You will bridge HPC and data systems, building low-latency kernels for terabyte/petabyte datasets across distributed clusters.

You’ll design bare-metal software layers, exploit multi-core and vector hardware, and enable in-database ML inference with strong focus on performance and scalability.