Principal Rust Software Engineer (Search & Database Engines)

Building data-driven AI applications and agents is too complex, even for advanced developers. At Spice AI, we’re making it simpler by helping developers combine code, data, and AI to build truly intelligent, decision-making systems. Our mission is to make this as easy as creating a modern web page.
We created Spice.ai OSS, a portable AI database written in Rust with a unified SQL interface to query, materialize, and accelerate data from any source, co-located with machine learning models. By bringing compute, data, and models together, Spice OSS enables secure AI-Feedback-Loops (AI-Fly-Wheels) for apps and agents to learn and adapt. We just announced the 1.0-stable release of Spice.ai OSS.
For a deeper dive into the vision, watch Luke's CMU Databases talk on Spice.ai OSS at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyM-ec1lKfU and read his Materialized View interview at https://materializedview.io/p/building-a-cdn-for-databases-spice-ai.
We're also building the Spice.ai Cloud Platform, offering managed, cloud-scale Spice.ai OSS along with tools for high-performance SQL, machine learning training, and inference in an interconnected AI backend-as-a-service.
At Spice AI, we hire for MEI: Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. We're looking for exceptional, top-tier engineers - A players - who are driven to solve hard problems and push the boundaries of what's possible for AI.
We’re looking for a Principal Rust Software Engineer to lead database development in Spice.ai OSS. In this role, you’ll design and build high-performance database engine features in Spice.ai, Apache DataFusion, Arrow, Iceberg, and duckdb-rs.
If you’re passionate about open source, distributed systems, and database internals, we want to hear from you.

Who we are looking for

• You are an exceptional engineer.
• You are a problem solver. You start customer problems and figure out how to solve them with technology.
• You think differently. You do not accept the status-quo. You challenge the current model of the world and take leaps of faith to build it better for everyone.
• You are positive. Instead of focusing on limitations, you ask what’s possible. 
• You care about meaningful work. Your work is more than a job. 
• You are comfortable with ambiguity and unknowns, and in these situations, you lead by creating clarity. 
• You are passionate about high performance and have high standards.

What we're looking for

• 2+ years professional Rust experience or 5+ yrs professional C/C++ experience.
• Experience in designing, implementing, scaling, and shipping production database-engines, distributed, and data systems.
• A track record of strong design, architectural, engineering, and product decisions.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Ability to ramp up quickly and hit the ground running.
• Ideally, experience contributing to open-source projects.
• Experience with Apache infra, CNCF-stack, or cloud-native development.

In this role, you'll

• Work side-by-side with the founders as a leader and outstanding contributor in the Spice.ai open-source project.
• Contribute to designing and building the Spice.ai Cloud Platform.
• Take ownership of initiatives to improve our offerings and deliver exceptional developer experiences.
• Work directly with enterprise customers and build with them to enable their scenarios.

Your first 90-days

• Your first week - contribute a bug fix or minor improvement to the Spice.ai OSS project
• Your first month - ramp up and contribute meaningful improvements to the Spice.ai OSS project
• 30-60 days - take technical and engineering ownership of an entire feature area.
• 60-90 days - propose and execute on aligned technical strategy going forward.

About Spice AI
Founded in June 2021 by Microsoft and GitHub alumni Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc, Spice AI creates technology to help developers build intelligent applications and agents that learn and adapt.