Software Engineering Manager, Database (SmithDB)

Job summary

Responsibilities

We're looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead the SmithDB team. This is not a pure people-management role. You'll write production code, review PRs at the systems level, make architectural calls, and be in the weeds alongside your engineers.

• Write and review production Rust code across ingestion, query execution, and storage layers
• Lead architectural decisions on storage format, compaction, indexing, and query planning
• Drive performance investigations using memory and CPU profiling tools; own the path from profiling to shipped fix
• Design and harden the distributed deployment of SmithDB services on Kubernetes (multi-tenant, high-throughput, low-latency)
• Contribute to cloud object store integrations (S3, GCS, Azure Blob) and set the standard for how SmithDB manages data at rest and in flight

What they're looking for

• 7+ years in systems or database engineering, with at least 2 years in a technical lead or engineering management role
• Production Rust experience — you can write it, review it, and have opinions on how to structure it at scale
• Deep understanding of database or storage engine internals: query execution, storage layouts, indexing, compaction
• Proficiency in systems performance analysis: memory allocators, CPU hotspots, lock contention, async runtimes (Tokio)
• Experience deploying and operating distributed services on Kubernetes in a production, multi-tenant environment

Tech stack

• LangGraph
• Rust
• Kubernetes
• Azure