Senior Database Engineer jobs in United States
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SurrealDB · 4 weeks ago

Senior Database Engineer

positionUnited States
timeFull-time
remoteRemote
senioritySenior Level

SurrealDB is a fast-growing database company seeking a Senior Software Engineer for their core database team. The role involves designing and implementing query planner improvements, optimizing storage engines, and enhancing execution performance to directly impact production workloads.

Big DataCloud ComputingDatabaseDeveloper PlatformDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareOpen Source

Responsibilities

Design and implement query planner improvements, index selection algorithms, and storage engine optimizations
Profile production workloads, identify bottlenecks, and ship performance fixes that make measurable differences
Build new database features - indexing strategies, execution engine refinements, query optimization techniques
Collaborate with engineering and product to prioritize features users actually need
Make pragmatic architectural decisions when theory meets reality
Review code, engage with the open-source community, and mentor engineers
Jump into ancillary systems (cloud infrastructure, SDKs) when needed to unblock progress

Qualification

Database internalsQuery optimizationRustIndexing strategiesPerformance tradeoffsMentoringCollaborationProblem-solving

Required

Deep expertise in database internals—query optimization, indexing, storage engines, or transaction processing
Experience shipping production database systems or meaningful time in database research
Fluent in Rust, comfortable with systems languages, pragmatic about using the right tool for the job
Strong understanding of performance tradeoffs and when to optimize vs. ship
Track record of shipping code people depend on, balancing correctness, performance, and maintainability
Excited by hard problems: smarter query planners, faster hot paths, index structures that work for real workloads
Comfortable making technical decisions with incomplete information in a fast-paced environment
Equally at home reading papers and profiling production systems

Preferred

Database experience is valuable but not required - if you're a strong systems engineer who gets excited about optimization problems and wants to go deep on database internals, we would love to hear from you

Company

SurrealDB

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SurrealDB is the ultimate multi-model database for tomorrow's applications
dateFounded in 2021
location
London, England, GBR
people-size11-50 employees
web-link
https://surrealdb.com

Funding

Current Stage
Early Stage
Total Funding
$26M
Key Investors
FirstMark
2024-06-17Series A· $20M
2022-12-07Seed· $6M

Leadership Team

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Tobie Morgan Hitchcock
Co-founder and CEO
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Recent News

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Jaime Morgan Hitchcock's Post: SurrealDB 2025 Wrap-up
2026-01-20
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SurrealDB’s Post: Use arrays to perform advanced operations
2026-01-20
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Mordechai Hadad’s Post: Rust query builder for SurrealDB
2026-01-20
Company data provided by crunchbase