Senior Staff Software Engineer - Query Engine

Be Part of Building the Future

The company is the unified lakehouse platform for self-service analytics and AI, serving hundreds of global enterprises, including Maersk, Amazon, Regeneron, NetApp, and S&P Global. Customers rely on the company for cloud, hybrid, and on-prem lakehouses to power their data mesh, data warehouse migration, data virtualization, and unified data access use cases. Based on open source technologies, including Apache Iceberg and Apache Arrow, the company provides an open lakehouse architecture enabling the fastest time to insight and platform flexibility at a fraction of the cost.  Learn more at  [link for members]

About the role

The company's Query Planner & Reflections team owns the SQL planner and optimizer, built on Apache Calcite, and the reflections engine that transparently rewrites queries to use pre-computed materializations instead of raw source data. The team sits between SQL and execution, owning the systems that turn queries into efficient plans and make them fast.

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you'll set technical direction for these systems: driving ambiguous, cross-team initiatives, raising the bar through design and code review, and growing other senior engineers. Your work will directly affect query performance, correctness, and cost across the company's cloud data platform.

What you'll be doing

• Set technical direction: Define architecture and roadmap for the query planner and reflections systems, including next-generation features.

• Build the planner: Design, implement, test, and support planning rules, cost-based optimization, query rewriting, and reflection matching and substitution.

• Own complex initiatives: Lead design and delivery of projects that cross team boundaries, working with Query Execution, Catalog, Datalake, and Product.

• Work with open source: Work deeply with Apache Calcite and Apache Iceberg, and drive contributions upstream where it benefits the company.

• Diagnose difficult problems: Investigate query planning correctness and performance issues, including reflection matching, using query profiles, telemetry, benchmarks, logs, and production data.

• Design for every deployment: Build systems that run correctly across the company's deployment models and public clouds.

• Use AI-assisted development tools: Apply AI tools to code comprehension, debugging, test generation, documentation, and incident analysis.

• Apply engineering judgment: Validate AI-generated code and recommendations through review, testing, benchmarking, and engineering judgment.

• Raise the engineering bar: Participate in design and code reviews, set technical standards, and mentor senior and staff-level engineers.

• Partner across the company: Work with Product on multi-quarter roadmap decisions and with Support and field engineering on the highest-impact customer issues.

What we're looking for

• Software engineering experience: 10+ years developing production software, including 5+ years of strong Java.

• Query planning and optimization: Deep understanding of cost-based optimization and rule-based query rewriting, ideally with hands-on experience in Apache Calcite or a similar framework.

• Database fundamentals: Strong knowledge of SQL, query processing, performance, and schema design.

• Computer science fundamentals: Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and multithreaded programming.

• Technical leadership: Track record of driving system-level architecture decisions, leading complex cross-team initiatives, and mentoring senior engineers.

• Access control: Experience with role-based or fine-grained access control in data platforms or database systems is a plus.

• Cloud and storage: Understanding of distributed file systems and object stores such as S3, ADLS, or HDFS; experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

• Engineering judgment: Ability to evaluate tradeoffs, validate solutions rigorously, and make sound decisions when working with unfamiliar or AI-assisted implementations.

• Communication and ownership: Ability to navigate ambiguous, cross-org problems independently, with strong communication skills and a commitment to delivering high-quality software.

Bonus points if you have

• Query engines: Experience with distributed query engines, database engines, or large-scale data processing systems.

• Planning techniques: Materialized view matching, query rewriting, statistics and cardinality estimation, or cost model design.

• Open source: Contributions to Apache Calcite, Apache Iceberg, or similar planner and data platform projects.

• Data platforms: Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, Parquet, Spark, or cloud object stores.

• Languages: C++.

What we value

At the company, we hold ourselves to high standards when it comes to People, Thinking, and Action. Our Gnarlies (that's what we call our employees) communicate with clarity, drive accountability, and are respectful towards each other. We confront brutal facts and focus on results while operating with a sense of urgency and building a "flywheel". People who like to jump in and drive momentum will thrive in our #GnarlyLife.

The company is an equal opportunity employer supporting workforce diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other unlawful factor.

The company is committed to providing any necessary accommodations for individuals with disabilities within our application and interview process. To request accommodation due to a disability, please inform your recruiter.

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Important Security Notice for Candidates

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