Senior Systems Engineer, Database

About the Role

Pangolin is Antithesis's custom streaming analytics database — the backbone of how our customers interact with and make sense of their data. It's built around a native tree structure that scales to over a billion nodes, supports ACID transactions, and lets customers define arbitrarily complex queries through JavaScript UDFs. Under the hood: disaggregated storage and compute, Lambda-based processing, and S3-backed storage — a modern architecture built from scratch rather than inherited.

It ingests and queries terabytes of customer data daily, and it does it fast. If you've ever read about a database limitation and thought that's a solvable problem, this is the place.

We're a small team working on genuinely unsolved problems: on-disk storage formats, query optimization, cross-table joins, and increasingly interactive data experiences. Pangolin is directly wired into the product — the notebook team builds on top of it, customers feel every improvement — so the work is real and the feedback loop is tight.

If you've thought deeply about how databases actually work and have the itch to build one that's better, this is the role.

What You'll Do

• Build and evolve Pangolin, our bespoke analytical database — a tree-native, streaming system handling terabytes of customer data daily.
• Work closely with internal customers — including the notebook/UI team — to define priorities, shape the roadmap, and deliver features that make data exploration faster and more fluid.
• Collaborate with the broader Infrastructure team on deployment, reliability, and scale.
• Write clean, well-reasoned design docs and contribute to the long-term technical direction of the system.

What We're Looking For

We want engineers who think carefully about performance and correctness, take ownership of systems end to end, and are energized by working directly with the people who use what they build.

• Strong proficiency in Rust; safe, performant, idiomatic code is second nature to you.
• Deep systems programming fundamentals — you can reason about memory, concurrency, and performance from first principles.
• Strong CS fundamentals in data structures and algorithms, with a habit of solving hard problems from the ground up.
• Strong backend engineering background; you've worked on or alongside database systems and understand what makes them tick — the more depth, the better.
• Product-minded: comfortable talking to internal customers, translating fuzzy requirements into concrete priorities, and owning delivery.

Bonus:

• Experience building, operating, or maintaining large-scale distributed backend systems; deep performance optimization experience; Linux internals; V8; AWS (S3 & Lambda).

About Our Team

Our team spans CS degrees, philosophy, mathematics, and everything in between, or nothing formal at all. What everyone shares is a high bar for engineering quality. We work in-person because it's how we build trust and tackle hard problems together.

Location: This position is 5 days in office in Vienna, VA or San Francisco, CA