database engineer

About this role

turbopuffer is looking for database engineers who want to advance the frontier of search.

what you'll do:

- design and implement improvements across one or more layers of our search engine (storage, indexing, querying)

- intensive performance hacking: tracing, CPU/heap profiling, optimizing data structures, using SIMD, tuning IO pipelines, etc.

- evolve our search primitives and APIs (full text + vector + reranking)

- work closely with customers to win their workloads and fold learnings back into the product

- write crisp docs

must have:

- systems engineering

- you've worked extensively in a systems language (Rust, C++, Java, Go, etc.)

- you think in memory layouts, cache lines, and syscalls

- you methodically work through problems until you've found the root cause

- domain expertise — you're an expert in at least one of the following domains

- search internals (e.g., inverted indexes, ANN indexes, rerankers)

- storage engines (e.g., LSMs, WALs, MVCC, compaction, GC)

- distributed systems (e.g., replication, leases, fault injection, simulation/chaos testing)

- linux — you're at home in terminals, eBPF/perf, strace, gdb

- typist — you can write well and explain complex ideas simply

- human — you build trust and admit what you don’t know

nice to have:

- multiple years of experience writing Rust

- you've maintained or operated serious systems in production, at scale

- you've made interesting contributions to the databases, IR, or systems communities (e.g., research, open source, speaking)

- additional domain expertise in:

- k8s and cloud infra (GKE/EKS/AKS, disks and networking, load balancers, observability)

- security (multi-tenant systems, isolation, sandboxing)

tpuf is hardcore & whimsical. we value:

- overstep > understep

- show > tell

- complexity is earned

- showing up as part of our customer’s team

- making stuff easy to react to