Software Engineering Manager, Database (SmithDB)

The role

You will lead the SmithDB team as a hands-on Engineering Manager. You will write production Rust code, make architectural decisions, and manage a small team of systems engineers.

What you will do

• Write and review production Rust code across ingestion, query execution, and storage layers
• Lead architectural decisions on storage format, compaction, indexing, and query planning
• Drive performance investigations using memory and CPU profiling tools
• Design and harden the distributed deployment of SmithDB services on Kubernetes
• Contribute to cloud object store integrations
• Build and maintain observability for the engine itself
• Manage a small but growing team of systems engineers
• Own the SmithDB technical roadmap
• Communicate progress, risks, and tradeoffs to the broader organization

Required qualifications

• 7+ years in systems or database engineering
• At least 2 years in a technical lead or engineering management role
• Production Rust experience
• Deep understanding of database or storage engine internals: query execution, storage layouts, indexing, compaction
• Proficiency in systems performance analysis: memory allocators, CPU hotspots, lock contention, async runtimes (Tokio)
• Experience deploying and operating distributed services on Kubernetes in a production, multi-tenant environment
• Familiarity with cloud object storage (S3-compatible APIs, consistency models, cost/performance tradeoffs)
• Proven track record of managing engineers

Nice to have

• Experience building or contributing to columnar storage formats (Parquet, Arrow), OLAP query engines, or time-series stores
• Background in observability infrastructure or tracing pipelines (OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, Prometheus)
• Experience scaling a system from early-stage to hundreds of billions / trillions of records

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible vacation
• 401(k) plan
• Meals on in-office days in the US
• Variable compensation for relevant roles
• Meaningful equity

About the company

LangChain builds the foundation for agent engineering to help developers move from prototypes to production-ready AI agents. The company offers a platform for building, evaluating, deploying, and operating agents at scale.