Staff Software Engineer - Query Planner & Reflections

Dremio; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Dremio is seeking a senior engineer to set the technical direction for software that plans and optimizes SQL queries and matches queries to precomputed results. The role spans architecture leadership, performance investigations, and collaboration with teams responsible for execution, catalogs, and data lakes.

You will work with Calcite and Iceberg, lead cross-team initiatives, and guide engineering standards through reviews while partnering with product to shape the roadmap and support

Qualifications

• Eight to ten or more years of production software development experience.
• Degree or equivalent experience in computer science or a related technical field.
• Deep understanding of query planning and optimization, including cost-based optimization and rule-based rewriting; experience with Calcite or a similar framework is valuable.
• Strong database fundamentals, including SQL, performance, and schema design.
• Track record of setting system architecture or component direction and leading complex, cross-team work.
• Ability to make sound tradeoffs, work independently through ambiguity, and communicate across teams.
• Understanding of distributed file systems such as S3, ADLS, or HDFS.

Responsibilities

• Shape architecture and technical direction for query planning, optimization, and materialization matching across product editions.
• Lead the design and delivery of complex initiatives that involve multiple engineering teams.
• Work with Apache Calcite and Apache Iceberg, including contributing upstream when useful.
• Investigate difficult correctness and performance issues using query profiles, telemetry, and production data.
• Design systems that work across deployment models and public cloud environments.
• Set engineering standards through design and code reviews, and help other engineers grow.
• Partner with product teams on longer-term roadmap decisions and help support teams resolve high-impact customer issues.
• Use AI-assisted development tools where useful, validating generated code through review, testing, and benchmarking.

Skills

SQL

Performance tuning

System architecture

Distributed systems

Architecture direction

Education

Degree in computer science or related field

Tools

Calcite

Apache Iceberg

Job description

Role overview

Set technical direction for software that plans and optimizes SQL queries and matches queries to precomputed results. The role spans complex engineering work across product components and deployment environments, combining architecture leadership, deep performance and correctness investigations, and collaboration with teams responsible for execution, catalogs, and data lakes.

Responsibilities

• Shape architecture and technical direction for query planning, optimization, and materialization matching across product editions.
• Lead the design and delivery of complex initiatives that involve multiple engineering teams.
• Work with Apache Calcite and Apache Iceberg, including contributing upstream when useful.
• Investigate difficult correctness and performance issues using query profiles, telemetry, and production data.
• Design systems that work across deployment models and public cloud environments.
• Set engineering standards through design and code reviews, and help other engineers grow.
• Partner with product teams on longer-term roadmap decisions and help support teams resolve high-impact customer issues.
• Use AI-assisted development tools where useful, validating generated code through review, testing, and benchmarking.

Requirements

• Eight to ten or more years of production software development experience.
• Degree or equivalent experience in computer science or a related technical field.
• Deep understanding of query planning and optimization, including cost-based optimization and rule-based rewriting; experience with Calcite or a similar framework is valuable.
• Strong database fundamentals, including SQL, performance, and schema design.
• Track record of setting system architecture or component direction and leading complex, cross-team work.
• Ability to make sound tradeoffs, work independently through ambiguity, and communicate across teams.
• Understanding of distributed file systems such as S3, ADLS, or HDFS.

Nice to have

• Fluency in Java or C++; experience with distributed query engines, query processing, materialized view matching, distributed systems, concurrency, code generation, Apache Arrow, caching, or disk spilling; contributions to planner or data infrastructure open-source projects; and experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP.