Senior Staff Engineer

Role overview

Provide hands-on technical leadership for a distributed, columnar time-series database backed by object storage. This senior staff role combines production systems engineering with company-wide influence: shaping product and architecture direction, delivering core storage and query capabilities, and raising engineering standards across teams.

Responsibilities

- Help define the product’s long-term technical direction and its place in the wider portfolio. - Work with engineering leaders on roadmap priorities and build-versus-buy decisions. - Design and write production Rust for ingestion, compaction, columnar storage, caching, and query execution. - Lead challenging work in distributed caching, reliability, and performance, from benchmarking through production operation. - Contribute to cloud deployment decisions and participate in the on-call rotation. - Establish engineering practices across teams and mentor staff and senior engineers.

Requirements

- 15 or more years of progressive software engineering experience, including several years at senior staff level or above; equivalent experience can substitute for an advanced degree. - A track record building and operating large-scale distributed systems. - Hands-on experience with multiple cloud providers and object storage. - Deep Rust experience, or strong systems engineering experience and readiness to become proficient in Rust. - Expertise in distributed caching, reliability, and performance engineering. - Ability to set technical direction across teams, influence executive decisions, and communicate clearly with engineers, leaders, and customers.

Nice to have

Experience with high-ingest time-series or observability workloads, operating a managed cloud database, or publishing talks, papers, or writing about databases and distributed systems.

Benefits and work setup

The organization is remote-first and globally distributed. US full-time benefits may include medical, dental, and vision coverage with full employee premiums covered, an FSA contribution, flexible time off, life and disability insurance, a 401(k), wellness programs, professional development funding, and financial planning and legal advice. Interviews are generally remote, with a possible in-person meeting at a final stage.