Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Hybrid/Remote

Description

SurrealDB is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for our core database team. Based in London or US East Coast, you’ll work on the hardest problems in database design - query optimization, storage engines, and execution performance - shipping improvements that directly impact production workloads. You’ll be essential to making SurrealDB faster, smarter, and more capable.

We’re specifically hiring for core database engineering. This role is for engineers who have built or modified database internals (e.g. storage engine, query execution, indexing, replication/consensus, transactions). If your experience is primarily operating databases (running, tuning, administering, or building applications on top of them), you may be a better fit for our Platform Engineering role.

What you will do

• Design and implement query planner improvements, index selection algorithms, and storage engine optimizations.
• Profile production workloads, identify bottlenecks, and ship performance fixes that make measurable differences.
• Build new database features - indexing strategies, execution engine refinements, query optimization techniques.
• Collaborate with engineering and product to prioritize features users actually need.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions when theory meets reality.
• Review code, engage with the open-source community, and mentor engineers.
• Jump into ancillary systems (cloud infrastructure, SDKs) when needed to unblock progress.

About you

• Deep expertise in database internals-query optimization, indexing, storage engines, or transaction processing
• Experience shipping production database systems or meaningful time in database research
• Fluent in Rust, comfortable with systems languages, pragmatic about using the right tool for the job.
• Strong understanding of performance tradeoffs and when to optimize vs. ship
• Track record of shipping code people depend on, balancing correctness, performance, and maintainability
• Excited by hard problems: smarter query planners, faster hot paths, index structures that work for real workloads
• Comfortable making technical decisions with incomplete information in a fast-paced environment
• Equally at home reading papers and profiling production systems.
• Database experience is valuable but not required - if you’re a strong systems engineer who gets excited about optimization problems and wants to go deep on database internals, we would love to hear from you.

We understand that each candidate brings a unique set of skills and experiences, and we encourage applicants to apply even if you do not meet all the qualifications listed in the job description.

Our London team have a hybrid working approach. We enjoy working and collaborating together, and require people to be in our Oxford Street office three days a week on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.