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 documentation.

Must Have

Systems Engineering:
- Worked extensively in a systems language (Rust, C++, Java, Go, etc.).
- Think in memory layouts, cache lines, and syscalls.
- Methodically work through problems until you've found the root cause.
Domain Expertise: 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: At home in terminals, eBPF/perf, strace, gdb.
Communication: Can write well and explain complex ideas simply.
Collaboration: Build trust and admit what you don’t know.

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