Senior System Test Engineer

The role

You will drive the correctness, reliability, and performance of Lance and LanceDB. You will build test frameworks and workloads to expose failures and partner with engineering to diagnose complex issues.

What you will do

• Define and drive system-level testing across correctness, reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Build automated test frameworks and realistic workloads.
• Validate data integrity and documented consistency guarantees.
• Develop fault-injection and resilience tests.
• Design load, stress, and long-running soak tests.
• Test upgrades, compatibility, and recovery scenarios.
• Partner with engineers to investigate failures using logs, metrics, traces, and source code.
• Develop and improve reproducible test environments in CI and release workflows.
• Use AI coding assistants and other AI tools to develop test harnesses and accelerate debugging.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, system test engineering, or test infrastructure.
• Substantial experience building or validating distributed databases or large-scale data systems.
• Deep understanding of distributed databases, including consistency models, replication, partitioning, concurrency control, durability, and failure recovery.
• Proven track record of designing tests that verify system invariants and uncover data corruption, race conditions, and failures.
• Strong programming skills in Python and at least one systems language such as Rust, C++, Java, or Go.
• Hands-on experience with fault injection, performance testing, workload generation, and automated testing in distributed environments.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI tooling adeptly in daily engineering work.
• Experience with Linux, cloud infrastructure, containers, CI/CD, and observability tools.
• Ability to own ambiguous projects, prioritize risk, communicate findings clearly, and collaborate closely with engineers.

Nice to have

• Experience testing database storage engines, query engines, vector search, or cloud object storage integrations
• Familiarity with LanceDB, Lance, Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Parquet, or related data infrastructure
• Experience with property-based testing, fuzzing, differential testing, or distributed consistency testing
• Experience with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and large-scale test environment orchestration
• Contributions to open-source databases, distributed systems, or testing frameworks

About the company

LanceDB is the AI-native Multimodal Lakehouse. Customers like Runway, Midjourney, and Netflix build the future of AI on LanceDB.