Director of Engineering

Director of Engineering, Distributed Systems

Bay Area (hybrid, 2 to 3 days a week)

$220k to $250k base + equity

I’m working with a database infrastructure company on a Director of Engineering hire. You’d lead the team that owns the core distributed systems layer of their product: storage, transactions and replication.

The company:

• Builds core data infrastructure used by large enterprises for mission-critical workloads
• Well past product-market fit, with revenue growing fast year on year
• Expanding into new AI products built on top of the core platform
• Their engineers really do use AI every day, and it’s already helped them ship products

The role:

• Lead a team of 8 to 10 engineers
• Set the technical direction across storage, consensus, distributed transactions and replication
• Part director, part tech lead. You won’t be writing production code, but you need to understand what the team is building in detail and push it in the right direction
• Work directly with the founders and senior engineering leadership on what to bet on in the short and long term
• The team is split between the Bay Area and remote engineers across North America and Europe
• The team will grow, and you’ll help build it

Some of what’s on the roadmap:

• Making AI workloads efficient in a distributed environment
• Replication at scale across many nodes and regions
• Ongoing performance work across CPU, disk and network latency

What they’re looking for:

• 10+ years as an engineer in distributed systems, storage or databases, ideally having reached staff, senior staff or tech lead level
• 3+ years managing engineers
• Experience on the core of the system, not the control plane. If you’ve designed replication, consensus, transactions, storage or recovery logic yourself, that’s what they want to see
• C/C++ ideally. Go, Rust or Java is fine
• A track record of finding bottlenecks and re-architecting for throughput, latency or scale

You don’t need to have built a database before. They’re also open to strong backgrounds in distributed storage, streaming and messaging platforms, consensus-based infrastructure or cloud data planes.

Nice to have:

• Database internals experience
• Open source contributions, patents or research you’ve brought into a product

Culture:

• Everyone is hands on and nobody treats any task as beneath them. Low ego goes a long way
• Flat structure, with leadership close to the engineering work
• The team is spread out, so a lot of communication is async. You need to be comfortable over-communicating and keeping people in different time zones working as one team
• Hybrid 2 to 3 days in the office. Nobody tracks attendance, and you’re trusted to manage your own time