[Hiring] database engineer @turbopuffer

Role Description

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

• 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.

Qualifications

• Systems engineering.
• Extensive experience in a systems language (Rust, C++, Java, Go, etc.).
• Ability to think in memory layouts, cache lines, and syscalls.
• Methodical problem-solving skills to find root causes.
• Domain expertise in at least one of the following areas:
• 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).
• Comfortable in Linux environments, using terminals, eBPF/perf, strace, gdb.
• Strong writing skills to explain complex ideas simply.
• Ability to build trust and admit what you don’t know.

Requirements

• Multiple years of experience writing Rust.
• Experience maintaining or operating serious systems in production, at scale.
• Interesting contributions to the databases, IR, or systems communities (e.g., research, open source, speaking).
• Additional domain expertise in:
• K8s and cloud infrastructure (GKE/EKS/AKS, disks and networking, load balancers, observability).
• Security (multi-tenant systems, isolation, sandboxing).

Benefits

• Hardcore & whimsical work environment.
• Values: overstep > understep, show > tell, complexity is earned, showing up as part of our customer’s team, making stuff easy to react to.