Principal Systems Developer – Kernel

About the role

The InterSystems IRIS data platform is the engine behind some of the world’s most important applications. At its core is a super scalable, high performance database engine built to naturally and flexibly store data accessed from multiple data models, including multi-dimensional arrays, key/value, relational tables, and objects. The database engine runs on a variety of operating systems including Linux, AIX and Windows. It’s designed to scale on large NUMA machines, distributed cache clusters, and the cloud.

The database kernel team needs a creative and motivated developer to join them in designing, implementing and enhancing components of the database engine and its embedded programming language. As part of a small team at the center of the data platform, you can expect to make a large impact with a high degree of independence.

Responsibilities

- Compose elegant, efficient, reliable and maintainable source code in C, with some C++

- Analyze, develop and optimize algorithms and data structures for efficiency in memory and/or modern storage devices

- Analyze and understand concurrency control and memory ordering issues around access to shared memory structures

- Learn, maintain and extend the embedded database programming language (ObjectScript) that comprises the application interface to the database

- Enhance interactions with modern operating systems and hardware devices

- Develop and maintain database management APIs

- Debug complex problems; develop and run test code

- Compose internal design documentation and guide external documentation

- Stay up to date with operating system, storage and database technology

Experience Required

- 10+ years developing low-level system code for mission-critical software

- Experience in C or C++; assembly is a plus.

- Strong technical knowledge of computer architecture, operating systems, concurrency control, compiler and interpreter methods, and software engineering techniques

- Excellent communication and collaboration skills

- Commitment to creating robust code to run for decades in high-stakes deployments

- Experience using AI-assisted tools (e.g. copilots, summarisation tools, or chatbots) with an ability to critically evaluate and verify AI-generated outputs

- Demonstrated ability to learn, evaluate, adapt to, propose and implement AI-augmented workflows in order to continually enhance your own, and the team’s productivity

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field

We are an equal-opportunity employer and do not discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, age, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression or any other legally protected category. InterSystems is an E-Verify Employer in the United States.