Senior / Staff Software Engineer (Database)

About the role

WHO WE ARE:

Materialize is the live context layer for AI agents and applications. Materialize lets engineering teams use SQL to transform siloed operational data into up-to-the-second, trustworthy views into any element of their business — delivering fresh context to AI agents, interactive search pipelines, and enabling low-latency, event-driven architectures for microservices and core business processes. Materialize is trusted by Notion, Bilt Rewards, and Crane Worldwide Logistics to solve their most pressing operational data challenges while building a live data foundation for their AI transformation.

Our team spans the US (NYC headquarters), Canada, and EMEA.

INVESTORS:

Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Our database technology sits at the heart of the Materialize product—a product that transforms years of cutting-edge academic research into the missing element of today’s data architecture https://materialize.com/blog/missing-element-data-architecture/. As a member of our Database team, you will join a team of ~10 incredible engineers focused on solving ambitious systems problems in service of delivering this remarkable product to our users.

Recent examples of the work the Database team focuses on include: evergreen efforts to drive down freshness https://materialize.com/blog/freshness/ & responsiveness https://materialize.com/blog/responsiveness/ while continuing to deliver correct, consistent https://materialize.com/blog/operational-consistency/ results; making each layer of the system more easily scalable; building the right primitives to integrate with the varied software development lifecycles of our users; unifying memory and disk through transparent use of swap; making our release process more predictable and reliable; writing clear documentation both internally and externally; improving observability and debugging tooling; and deleting lots of no-longer-needed code.

This role is based in our NYC office (by Astor Place), with an expectation of ≥3 days per week in person.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Design and deliver improvements to the Database, with an eye on correctness, reliability, and performance.

- Own projects end-to-end, from early stage design to holding the pager.

- Debug and resolve complex distributed systems issues, sometimes directly with customers.

- Continually improve system reliability, observability, and automation.

- Collaborate across your team, with Product, with Field Eng, and all other stakeholders to align on direction, carefully prioritize, and build the best product for our users.

- Share your work through mentorship, demos, blog posts, and any other relevant channels.

ABOUT YOU

- You have several years of experience developing software, and are passionate about distributed systems and/or databases. If you don’t use it already, you’re excited to learn Rust.