Founding Software Engineer

$150K - $225K3% - 3.00%3% - 3.00%3% - 3.00%3% - 3.00%3% - 3.00%3% - 3.00% Job type Full-time Role Engineering, Full stack Experience 3+ years Visa US citizen/visa only Skills PostgreSQL, Rust

About the role

Hey! PgDog is a tiny database startup, based out of SF, with a global team. Were scaling the worlds most popular database, PostgreSQL. PgDog is in production, used by dozens of companies, large and small. The problem is big, but so is the opportunity, and were hiring!

About the role

The jack of all trades. Rust, Postgres, a bit of infrastructure, networking, distributed systems, and so much more. Youll build features that will go directly into our customers hands, the day you ship them. With great power comes great responsibility. Youre meticulous, detail-oriented and are not afraid to take calculated risks. You write tests because you want to make sure the thing works, not to check a box. Youre not afraid to run code in production, on real data; after all, thats the only way to know something really works. Also, pretty important these days: you dont let AI do the thinking for you; youre comfortable with and without it.

First week

Youll fix a bug or ship a cool feature. Well give it to one of our users or customers to try right away.

First month

Youll get acquainted with pretty much all of our code. Youll start coming up with your own bug fixes and features.

Three months later

Youre designing our roadmap. Youre contributing to everything were doing: coding, talking with customers, and even finding us more! Things we badly want to build:

Advanced OLAP query engine. People dont like to rewrite their queries, so lets make them just work with sharded Postgres! If youre wondering how much work that is, check out the Postgres SQL reference. All of it has to work!

In-place data redistribution: lets make Postgres scale like Cassandra/Elastic. Having the ability to dynamically shard would be super cool and make it a push-button op.

If any of this sounds super hard...well, thats because it is, but only on the surface. Were splitting this up into small, achievable tasks, and shipping them straight to prod!

Day to day

Mostly digging through the Postgres manual and building a distributed database, from scratch, using first principles (and as many Wikipedia articles as you need). Everything is written in Rust, so that makes it easier. Type-safe,fearless concurrency,and an awesome open source ecosystem where you can find pretty much any library well need... and if you cant,you can build your own and contribute it back to the world. Time split is going to be something like 30% bug fixes,60% new features,10% infra glue.

The backstory

I did this at Instacart back in 2020. Grew the company 5x in a few months,just by making Postgres do things it wasnt built for. If you make the database you already have just work,people love it; nobody wants to migrate to Dynamo. Ive been coding in Rust for close to 10 years,even wrote my own web framework for fun. PgDog started as something to do while I was unemployed; one year later,it's mission-critical infra for some pretty serious people, so thats cool.

Compensation

• 150k-225k / year
• 1-3% equity

Perks

• Health & dental,fully covered-
• Unlimited PTO-
• If you’re in SF Bay Area: coffee,dinner,hikes,bike rides, etc.; I’m always down to hang out! We can also walk my giant 90 pound dog (and now you know where the name PgDog comes from).

About the interview

1.30min intro call. 2.Technical deep dive (1h-3h). 3.Work with us for a week or two on a contract basis. 4.Join full time!

About PgDog

Postgres is the most popular database period,but running it in production is hard.We're building scaling tools,like load balancing and sharding,to make Postgres the one database you'll ever need. Location: San Francisco, CA; CA; OR; Remote Remote allowed: true (Remote mentioned) Employment type: full_time Experience level: mid/senior (3+ years) Salary range: $150K - $225K per year Skills: PostgreSQL, Rust Application URL: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs/pgdog-founding-software-engineer