database engineer
This is the employer's own posting, not a copy on a job board.
What we know
Is it still open?
Confirmed still open
Last checked 2d ago — checked against the employer's own applicant tracking system, which is the company answering directly.
We re-read the employer's own applicant tracking system and the posting was still there. That is the company answering directly.
How old is it?
Posted 10d ago
The date the source published, not the day we noticed it (2026-09-30). Last seen at its source 1h ago.
We have tracked this listing since 5 Oct 2026 (5 days). The employer's own board has carried it every time we have read it, most recently 1 hour ago.
Is it remote?
Marked remote on the employer's board
Their board carries a remote setting on this posting — a field they filled in, not wording we read. The location field names somewhere specific, which is usually where the team or the entity sits.
Who may apply?
United States, Canada
The description states no restriction of its own. This is the source's own tag.
Pay not stated
Similar roles pay $150k–224.8k/yr
Middle 50% of 4027 listings that do state pay — Engineering · all levels · United States · USD/year. This employer has published no salary; this is what comparable listings we hold disclose, never converted between currencies or periods. How this is calculated.
Skills named in the ad
Recognised terms only, from a fixed vocabulary — this is what CV matching compares against.
Carried by 1 source
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Ashby employer's own board first seen 5d ago · last seen 1h ago
The listing
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 domain expertise in:
k8s and cloud infra (GKE/EKS/AKS, disks and networking, load balancers, observability)
security (multi-tenant systems, isolation, sandboxing)
tpuf is hardcore & whimsical. we value:
overstep > understep
show > tell
complexity is earned
showing up as part of our customer’s team
making stuff easy to react to