# database engineer at Turbopuffer

- Company: Turbopuffer
- Status: Open
- Workplace: Remote
- Location: US / Canada · Remote
- Level: Mid-level
- Discipline: Backend
- Employment: Full-time
- Posted: 2026-09-30
- Skills: SIMD
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/turbopuffer/317f14bf-49dc-46ae-a4d8-6aea3fa41ecc

## Description

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 d

More Turbopuffer roles: https://deviantjobs.com/companies/turbopuffer