Staff Engineer

YugabyteDB•Sunnyvale, CA

15h•$150,000 - $250,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At Yugabyte, we are on a mission to become the default transactional database for enterprises building cloud-native applications. YugabyteDB is our PostgreSQL compatible distributed database for cloud-native apps. Resilient, scalable, and flexible, it runs on any cloud and enables developers to become instantly productive using well-known APIs.We are looking for talented and driven people to join us on our ambitious mission and help us build a lasting and impactful company.The transactional database market is estimated to grow to $150B by 2030. YugabyteDB is cloud-native by design, has on-demand horizontal scalability, and supports geographical distribution of data using built-in replication. This means that we are well-positioned to meet market demand for geo-distributed, high-scale, high-performance workloads. Yugabyte offers a culture of innovation, ownership, and technical excellence, with opportunities to impact a cutting-edge distributed SQL database used by global enterprises. As a member of the LRT team, you’ll help shape YugabyteDB’s language layer and relational capabilities — instrumental to our product’s success. As a Staff Engineer on the Languages & Relational Technologies (LRT) team, you will help design, build, and scale core database features that power YugabyteDB’s SQL layer. You will collaborate with cross-functional engineering teams to solve complex problems affecting distributed query planning, execution, and performance, ensuring YugabyteDB remains robust, reliable, and performance at scale.

Requirements

8+ years of professional experience in software engineering, with a strong foundation in compiled languages such as C/C++.
Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science (or related field), or equivalent practical experience.
Deep understanding of systems engineering fundamentals, including operating systems, distributed systems, and databases.
Experience with database internals, compilers, or query planning/optimization is a strong plus.
Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to operate effectively in a collaborative, distributed team environment

Nice To Haves

Experience building large-scale distributed systems and transactional engines.
Familiarity with PostgreSQL internals or other relational database engines.
Contributions to open source database or systems projects.
Prior leadership in technical architecture, performance tuning, and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

Lead the design, development, testing, and release of new database features and enhancements in YugabyteDB.
Write high-quality C/C++ code (and contribute in other languages as needed) with comprehensive automated tests; participate actively in code reviews.
Identify and implement performance improvements — including plan optimization, batching/parallelism, and advanced push-downs to data nodes.
Improve database scalability and throughput as cluster sizes and transaction volumes grow.
Contribute to the open source YugabyteDB project and help strengthen our distributed SQL capabilities across releases.
Troubleshoot and resolve correctness, stability, and performance issues in complex distributed query planning and execution paths.
Mentor and influence other engineers in best practices for database internals, distributed systems, and performance-oriented software development.