Principal Rust Software Engineer (Search & Database Engines)

Building data-driven AI applications and agents is too complex, even for advanced developers.

This new generation of applications need fast, secure access to data across disparate systems, the ability to search and reason over that data, and infrastructure that’s reliable enough to run in production. Today, teams often need to piece together query engines, search systems, caches, and AI tooling, adding significant complexity along the way.

At Spice AI, we simplify this by unifying query federation, search, and AI into a single runtime for building intelligent applications. Our mission is to make building AI-powered software as easy building a modern web application and help developers build the next generation of applications. We offer both open source and fully managed cloud deployments.

For a deeper dive into the vision, watch Founder and CEO Luke Kim's CMU Databases talk on Spice.ai OSS at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyM-ec1lKfU and read his Materialized View interview at https://materializedview.io/p/building-a-cdn-for-databases-spice-ai.

At Spice AI, we hire for MEI: Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. We're looking for exceptional, ambitious builders who are driven to solve hard problems and push the boundaries of what's possible for AI.

We’re looking for a Principal Rust Software Engineer to lead database development in Spice.ai OSS. In this role, you’ll design and build high-performance database engine features in Spice.ai, Apache DataFusion, Arrow, Iceberg, and duckdb-rs.

If you’re passionate about open source, distributed systems, and database internals, we want to hear from you.

• You are an exceptional engineer.
• You are a problem solver. You start customer problems and figure out how to solve them with technology.
• You think differently. You do not accept the status-quo. You challenge the current model of the world and take leaps of faith to build it better for everyone.
• You are positive. Instead of focusing on limitations, you ask what’s possible. 
• You care about meaningful work. Your work is more than a job. 
• You are comfortable with ambiguity and unknowns, and in these situations, you lead by creating clarity. 
• You are passionate about high performance and have high standards.

• 2 years professional Rust experience or 5 yrs professional C/C experience.
• Experience in designing, implementing, scaling, and shipping production database-engines, distributed, and data systems.
• A track record of strong design, architectural, engineering, and product decisions.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Ability to ramp up quickly and hit the ground running.
• Ideally, experience contributing to open-source projects.
• Experience with Apache infra, CNCF-stack, or cloud-native development.

• Work side-by-side with the founders as a leader and outstanding contributor in the Spice.ai open-source project.
• Contribute to designing and building the Spice.ai Cloud Platform.
• Take ownership of initiatives to improve our offerings and deliver exceptional developer experiences.
• Work directly with enterprise customers and build with them to enable their scenarios.

• Your first week - contribute a bug fix or minor improvement to the Spice.ai OSS project
• Your first month - ramp up and contribute meaningful improvements to the Spice.ai OSS project
• 30-60 days - take technical and engineering ownership of an entire feature area.
• 60-90 days - propose and execute on aligned technical strategy going forward.

About Spice AI

Founded in June 2021 by Microsoft and GitHub alumni Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc, Spice AI creates technology to help developers build intelligent applications and agents that learn and adapt.

Before co-founding Spice AI, Luke was the co-creator of Azure Incubations in the Office of the Azure CTO, where he led cross-functional engineering teams to create and develop technologies including Dapr and OAM.

Spice AI is backed by some of the top industry angel investors and leaders, including Nat Friedman, Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, and Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, who is also on the board.

Spice AI also has notable VC backing from Madrona Venture Group, Basis Set Ventures, Founders' Co-op, and Picus Capital.

Learn more:

- On TechCrunch and GeekWire

- About the team at spice.ai/careers

- The Spice.ai general availability announcement blog post

- The Spice.ai OSS project announcement blog post