USD per year
Database Engineer — OLAP Internals
Created January 5, 2025 3:46 PM Last edited time October 30, 2025 16:53 Department Engineering Employment Type Full-Time Location Remote San Francisco
What we do
ParadeDB is a transactional alternative to Elasticsearch built on Postgres. We build state-of-the-art full-text search and columnar analytics as a Postgres extension. Companies like Modern Treasury, BILT Rewards, Alibaba Cloud, and UnifyGTM use ParadeDB to:
- Eliminate ETL/change data capture tools
- Add transactional guarantees to their search indexes
- Perform JOINs on their search data
We're a small, focused team of engineers dedicated to creating an inclusive and enjoyable work environment. We have an office in San Francisco, with some team members distributed across the United States and Canada. We’re a Series A Company with a flat structure, strong investors, and lots of room for growth.
What we want
We're looking for an OLAP internals database engineer to join our team full-time. The ideal candidate should have:
- A solid foundation in data systems/internals
- Experience building analytical query engines, from columnar storage to query optimization (bonus points if you were responsible for building vectorized processing optimizations)
- Proficiency in systems programming with C/C++/Rust/Zig (bonus points for Rust)
- Strong background in full-text search systems and familiarity with Tantivy is a plus
- Familiarity with Postgres internals and pgrx is a plus
We're seeking someone creative, independent, and excited by difficult technical challenges who can teach us as much as they learn from us. The ideal candidate will bring thoughtful opinions to the team, be excited to engage with and learn from customers, and be willing to wear many hats.
What you want
You want to be part of the core team of a fast-growing infrastructure startup You want to wear many hats and interface directly with customers You’re passionate about the OLAP ecosystem, Postgres, databases, and/or search technologies You’re excited about diving deep into the internals of Postgres and writing high-performance, safe Rust code to elevate Postgres for search and analytical workloads You’re excited to build a state-of-the-art analytical query engine in Postgres and grow to own a meaningful part of the ParadeDB product You’re excited to learn about the internals of Tantivy and draw inspirations from systems like Apache DataFusion, and columnar file formats like Parquet/Arrow to inspire Postgres optimizations in ParadeDB You believe in open-source and want to contribute to building a sustainable open-source business You want autonomy over your work and the opportunity to make impactful design decisions
What you've done
You have meaningful experience working on OLAP query engines and query optimization, whether through contributions to commercial projects or through high-quality open-source work You have prior experience working on complex data systems in Rust, C++, C or Zig and can navigate a complex codebase effectively (bonus points if you have contributions to an open-source project that you can showcase) You have architected data system(s) focusing on performance, scalability, and maintainability (bonus points if in Rust) You have optimized and debugged complex systems using profiling tools You have prior experience at a small, high-performing startup Overall, you’re smart, willing to work hard, communicative, and open to learning about any service or framework you may not have worked with before
What you'll do
- Develop and optimize the ParadeDB Postgres extension’ analytical capabilities by interfacing with Postgres block storage, query planner, query executor, and more using Postgres APIs via pgrx
- Develop with the internals of Tantivy, sometimes making modifications to Tantivy as required, to develop new features within the ParadeDB Postgres extension
- Design and implement efficient data structures and algorithms for search and analytics functionality, drawing inspiration from or directly utilizing existing open-source projects
- Optimize query performance and resource utilization using profiling tools
- Develop and maintain documentation, including API references and user guides
- Engage directly with our customers and open-source community on GitHub and Slack
- Contribute to technical writing, product demos, and content marketing
What's next
Please send your resume and anything else you'd like to share to founders@paradedb.com. We will get back to you as soon as we can. We're excited to meet you! ParadeDB is committed to fostering a welcoming and inclusive work environment for people of all backgrounds. We urge candidates of all backgrounds to apply. If you require specific accommodations, please let us know at accommodations@paradedb.com.
A small, focused team building a Postgres-native alternative to Elasticsearch. The team is distributed across the United States and Canada and is passionate about data systems, search, analytics, Postgres, and Rust.
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