database engineer

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