Database & Systems Engineer
Engineers in this role design and operate the database and storage systems that underpin AI infrastructure at massive scale, handling everything from query optimization and transaction management to distributed storage architecture. They work deeply with storage engines, cache layers, and multi-database topologies, making critical tradeoffs between consistency, performance, and resilience as their systems support billions of requests and exabyte-scale workloads. Unlike query optimization or distributed systems specialists, these engineers own the full vertical of how data is stored, retrieved, and scaled—partnering with infrastructure and product teams to ensure databases reliably serve both transactional product workloads and compute-intensive AI training pipelines. They typically sit within platform or infrastructure organizations alongside teams building query engines, replication systems, and cloud infrastructure.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Designing and implementing distributed database systems and storage architectures
Optimizing query execution plans and database performance at scale
Architecting systems to handle massive scale with high throughput and low latency requirements
Developing storage engines and managing index structures for optimal performance
Diagnosing and resolving performance bottlenecks through profiling and telemetry analysis
Building transactional consistency mechanisms, durability guarantees, and crash recovery systems
Managing concurrent access, locking, and conflict resolution in multi-user systems
Designing and implementing data replication and distributed consensus protocols
Building infrastructure for monitoring, observability, and operational visibility
Conducting root cause analysis and leading incident response and recovery
Designing schema optimization strategies and managing database evolution
Designing low-latency caching layers and in-memory data structures
Implementing security controls, encryption, and data isolation mechanisms
Scaling systems across multiple cloud providers and deployment environments
Building event-driven architectures and stream processing systems
Optimizing resource utilization and cost efficiency in cloud infrastructure
Implementing vector databases and machine learning-specific storage solutions
Collaborating across teams to align technical decisions with product requirements
Leading technical vision and setting architectural direction for teams
Mentoring and developing engineers through code review and knowledge sharing
Communicating technical concepts and design rationale to diverse audiences
Managing and scaling engineering teams while maintaining high standards
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
34 open Database & Systems Engineer jobs across 11 companies.
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