Software Engineer, User Database Infrastructure
$234k - $352k • San Francisco, California • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco, California
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
This role is focused on building the core database infrastructure that empowers knowledge workers to leverage scalable databases without needing to be a Database Administrator. You will be a hands-on technical leader, influencing architectural direction and the product roadmap as a new product moves from early alpha to general availability. This involves working directly with early customers to shape critical technical and product decisions, and then scaling these systems as adoption and workloads grow. The work is backend-leaning but spans the full stack, potentially involving the provisioning and management of customer Postgres instances, designing safe schema evolution, and optimizing complex query execution. You will also translate these systems into the product experience, improving table loading, user understanding of performance, and agent data interactions. Ultimately, you will help shape both the architecture and the product by identifying the best solutions, whether through improved abstractions, better defaults, or rethinking user interactions, and evolving them based on usage.
Responsibilities
- Take a new product from alpha to general availability, working with early customers to iterate on feedback and shape the shipped product.
- Improve query execution, indexing, and client data loading to ensure performance scales with growing datasets and demanding workflows.
- Build reliable systems for schema changes, concurrent writes, permissions, and recovery, enabling customers to build essential workflows.
- Transform database provisioning, migrations, and indexes into an approachable product experience.
- Automate database provisioning and fleet operations, strengthen observability, and evolve the architecture for scalability.
- Contribute to architectural direction and roadmap for a new product.
- Work directly with early customers to shape technical and product decisions.
- Scale systems as adoption and workloads grow.
- Build systems for provisioning and managing customer Postgres instances.
- Design how user-defined schemas evolve safely.
- Optimize complex query execution.
- Improve how tables load and how users understand slow operations.
- Ensure AI agents work safely with customer data.
Requirements
- Production relational database experience (e.g., Postgres or MySQL), including schema/index decisions, performance analysis, and debugging transactions, locking, or concurrency issues.
- Experience goes beyond accessing a database through an ORM.
- 10+ years of experience building and operating production software.
- Proven track record of setting technical direction and leading complex, cross-team initiatives.
- Ability to identify key problems, translate ambiguous goals into technical strategy, and align teams around a plan.
- Hands-on approach with mentorship and clear technical guidance.
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including building services that remain correct under concurrency and failure.
- Ability to reason about retries, partial failures, consistency, and trade-offs in reliable reads and writes.
- Systematic approach to performance analysis using query plans, traces, profiles, and experiments.
- Willingness to investigate problems across storage, services, and client code.