Senior Staff Software Engineer - Query Execution

Role overview Join the Query Execution team that builds the runtime turning query plans into efficient, reliable execution at scale. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will own work across query operators, expression evaluation, memory management, execution scheduling, and runtime planning, with direct influence on the performance, scalability, and reliability of a unified lakehouse platform serving hundreds of global enterprises.

Responsibilities - Design, implement, test, and support core components of the query execution engine - Improve runtime performance through vectorized processing, concurrency, parallelism, memory tuning, data exchange, and disk spilling - Diagnose query correctness and performance issues using profiles, telemetry, benchmarks, logs, and production data - Tune Java and JVM behaviour, including CPU utilisation, allocation, garbage collection, and threading - Collaborate with query planning, storage, product, support, and field engineering teams on end-to-end improvements - Use AI-assisted development tools for code comprehension, debugging, test generation, and incident analysis, while validating outputs through review and benchmarking - Contribute to technical direction through design and code reviews and mentor other engineers

Requirements - 5 or more years developing production software, ideally in database systems, query execution, or distributed systems - Strong Java skills; C++ experience a plus - Solid foundation in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, multithreading, and asynchronous programming - Knowledge of database internals, query processing, distributed execution, and performance optimisation - Hands-on experience profiling and optimising CPU, memory, garbage collection, and thread behaviour - Strong engineering judgement, with the ability to evaluate tradeoffs and validate solutions rigorously - Clear communication, a sense of ownership, and a commitment to high-quality software

Nice to have - Background with distributed query engines, database engines, or large-scale data processing systems - Experience with vectorized execution, code generation, or runtime optimisation techniques - Familiarity with Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, Parquet, Avro, Spark, Hadoop, or cloud object stores - Contributions to open-source projects

Benefits and work setup - Equal opportunity employer committed to workforce diversity, with accommodations available for candidates with disabilities throughout the application and interview process