database engineer
turbopuffer — US / Canada
Posted 2026-09-30
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