VideoAmp - Job openings - Principal Database Infrastructure Engineer
Requirements
• 8+ years of software engineering experience with significant depth in database infrastructure, distributed systems, or data platform engineering. • Strong systems programming in Rust, or deep C++ or Go experience with a clear path to Rust, including async runtimes such as Tokio and concurrent data structures. • Proven experience building or significantly modifying a distributed data system such as a query engine, stream processor, distributed database, or large-scale data pipeline, with a solid understanding of shuffles, partitioning, and network and memory bottlenecks. • Fluency with columnar formats and vectorized execution, including Arrow, Parquet, and the mechanics behind their performance characteristics. • Strong grounding in distributed systems fundamentals: consistent hashing, leader and heartbeat protocols, backpressure, partial failure, and graceful degradation. • A performance engineering mindset: you profile before optimizing and defend changes with real benchmark numbers. • Strongly Preferred • Strongly Preferred • Direct experience with Apache DataFusion or another SQL query planner or optimizer such as Spark Catalyst, Calcite, Trino, ClickHouse, or DuckDB. • Experience with Apache Iceberg or a comparable open table format such as Delta Lake or Hudi. • Familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure including EKS, S3, and IRSA, particularly on ARM or Graviton. • Query optimizer experience including join ordering, predicate pushdown, and cardinality or selectivity estimation. • Experience with a distributed SQL store such as CockroachDB, Flight SQL or gRPC, or contributions to open source data infrastructure projects. • Experience building or working with developer tooling in agentic or programmatic data access contexts, and is a strong plus.
Responsibilities
• Distributed Query Execution • Design and implement the physical plan distribution pass, including network shuffle, coalesce, and partition isolator insertion. Own the plan serialization codec that ships sub-plans to workers, and maintain the S3 and Flight result exchange paths. • Worker Coordination at Scale • Own worker discovery and heartbeating, and lead development of the next generation of load balancing: a work-stealing protocol and a replication-aware hash ring, both currently in design, to keep workers evenly loaded and resilient to node loss. • Query Optimizer Internals • Work across cost-based join reordering, cross-stage bloom filter cascade, scan deduplication, and selectivity estimation. Several of these live in our DataFusion fork; you will upstream where it makes sense and maintain the delta where it does not. • Storage and Caching • Storage and Caching • Own the NVMe LRU cache over S3, Parquet read strategies including full-file and range reads, and Iceberg partition pruning and snapshot handling. • Performance Engineering • Close the remaining gap on queries where we still trail Snowflake, specifically multi-shuffle plans and redistribution after scalar-subquery extraction. TPC-H benchmarks are the scorecard.
Benefits
• $190,000 to $220,000 (commensurate with experience) • Equity • Equity participation included • Time Off • Discretionary & flexible PTO + Spring, Summer & Winter company breaks • Health • Inclusive and comprehensive medical, dental & vision • Financial • 401(k) with matching · HSA & FSA • Family • Paid Maternity & Parental Leave for all family additions • Cell phone & wifi reimbursement · Commuter benefits • Our Values • 01 One VideoAmp • We win together • We operate as one team, prioritizing shared success over individual wins. We collaborate across functions, support one another, and assume positive intent, because when one of us succeeds, we all do. • 02 Own the Outcome • Accountability + Empowerment • We take full responsibility for results, not just tasks. We act with urgency, make decisions with confidence, and own both successes and setbacks while continuously improving. • 03 Raise the Bar • Quality · Trust · Excellence • We hold ourselves and each other to a high standard. We deliver thoughtful, high-quality work, build trust through consistency and integrity, and continuously push for better outcomes. • Ready to build what's next in AI-powered media measurement?
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