Junior Engineer- Database Sources

Airbyte is the open-source standard for Data Movement. We enable data teams to move data from applications, APIs, unstructured sources, and databases to data warehouses, lakes, AI applications and LLMs. With our approach we are finally solving the need for extensibility and control that every company needs with data.   So far, our customers, users, and ourselves have built over 15,000 connectors and have had 200,000+ companies install Airbyte. We've raised $181M from the world's top investors (Benchmark, Accel, Altimeter, Coatue, Y Combinator, etc.) and we believe in product-led growth, where we build something awesome that all our users love.   We’re committed to providing as much context to our current employees and candidates. The Airbyte company handbook is open to all.   Airbyte is in-person in our Embarcadero office weekly. If you find this role exciting, we encourage you to apply even if you think you don’t meet all requirements  

Opportunity

As an Engineer on the Database Sources Team, you will build and maintain the most popular source connectors at Airbyte: database connectors.  Building these connectors will require you to go deep into each database and understand its approach to optimized queries, write-ahead logging, and information schema management. You will use that learning to efficiently pull data from these databases as well as build Change Data Capture (CDC). You will also contribute to the framework for extracting data from these systems. 

 

You will ensure that we can support all data (different types, size, encodings, etc) in ways that empower our users. You will also make sure we leverage database-specific features to make Airbyte best-in-class for each source that we support.  You will help to build the tools to empower our community to create and extend databases on their own.  You will push forward Airbyte’s mission-critical connectors and make them the undisputed industry leaders.

 

Responsibilities

• Own core technologies:
• Contribute connectors to Airbyte's connector platform, open-source platform, and cloud product. Deploy new features to production and manage the ongoing improvements of a fleet of high-volume data connectors and their underlying CDK. 

• You will add to your developer toolbelt by practicing smart testing using: dependency injection, unit testing, progressive rollouts.

•  Address issues in our codebase:
• Work with internal and external engineers to identify bugs.  Use your software and data-engineering skills to debug and unblock customers who are experiencing complex technical issues around our database connector sources. At times, you’ll be accessing live customer data, so care and caution are paramount. Replicate issues, diagnose problematic code or connector/platform versions, and ship fixes.
• Build leverage:
• Jump into our developer tools to increase monitoring/alerting, write SQL queries, build dashboards, create automation scripts and regularly challenge our engineering processes. A week-long task this year should take ten minutes next year.
• Grow our knowledge base:
• Document solutions and application behavior to grow our knowledge base both internally and externally. User-facing docs are regularly updated to provide additional clarity and are edited with relevant troubleshooting and limitations
• Engage with the open-source community:
• Attend industry and company events, review pull requests, monitor our Slack and Github discussions
• Grow as a developer:
• Receive in-person mentorship from some of the best engineers in the industry whilst learning new technologies.
• Become familiar with distributed systems, data pipelines, blob storage, cloud hosting
• Develop a user-centric approach to building products and developer tools.

Requirements

• Computer Science or adjacent degree (completion by May 2025) or boot camp graduate/self-taught programmer with Data/Software Engineering experience.
• Familiarity with databases/warehouses
  (e.g. Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, Iceberg, Snowflake)
• You are comfortable coding in Java/Kotlin and writing SQL
• Excellent technical research skills (the problems we face don’t have answers on Stackoverflow, we need to get into the weeds and run experiments). 
• About you: 
• You describe yourself as an analytical, self-starter with a growth mindset.
• You have an insatiable desire to ship. 
• You enjoy building abstractions & tools which multiply output. 
• You are passionate about continuous learning and improvement (both at a personal and team level)