DBA/ Senior Storage Infra Engineer

About us

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production. Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more.

We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

Who you are

We’re looking for great engineers with experience in building the backbone of highly performant systems, and who have shown they can handle very large volumes of structured data. Customers use our platform to store, query, analyse and manipulate billions of items of data, and keeping these operations fast and reliable at massive scale is a strategic imperative and major competitive advantage for us.

For this role we are particularly interested in engineers with demonstrated experience building and maintaining traditional relational DB systems like PostgreSQL at large scale (10^8+ rows), in a setting where reliability and performance are mission critical.
Bonus points for prior experience with large scale columnar storage systems such as ClickHouse and/or vector stores like Vespa, but we care more about what you’ll be able to teach yourself while with us than what you already know.

You'll join us at a crucial stage of accelerated development for the company, product and team. As part of a small, highly collaborative group, you'll be a key driver of progress on a core part of our product. You will be expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy, and will have end to end ownership of building performant, reliable and maintainable solutions to novel and challenging technical problems.

What to expect:
• High performing team: You'll join the small team that has built a product that our customers love. Members of the team are veterans of both established companies and successful startups, and many are successful ex-founders. While the team is more than a sum of its parts, every member is impressive in their own right.
• Impact: Your work will have direct and tangible impact for customers and in turn noticeably affect the trajectory of the company.
• End-to-end ownership: You will be entrusted with end-to-end ownership of your projects. From product, design and architectural decisions, all the way to deployment, monitoring and measuring impact on users. We expect everyone to take initiative, be proactive in problem-solving, and continuously seek improvement.
• Autonomy and collaboration: You will often work autonomously to take charge of your projects, make decisions, and drive your work forward. But as a lean and high trust team, we remain quick to collaborate and support each other with challenging problems together.
• Scale and simplicity: You will tackle complex domains and immense scale with simple solutions. You'll leverage your expertise to solve challenging problems in simple ways.

About You:
• You are experienced: You have seen a lot and built a lot. You have personally developed and maintained systems from scratch and you know the trade offs that are involved in building reliable, performant software at speed.
• You seek high impact: You want your work to have a tangible outcome for people. You're not satisfied when building products that do not see the light of day or move a number by a tenth of a percent.
• You are a builder: You enjoy all aspects of building not only software but a complete product. You enjoy problem solving and thinking from first principles and are ready to pick up new skills and build quickly.
• You are comfortable with uncertainty: You're happy to tackle problems without a predefined clear definition or obvious solution, and are excited to have autonomy to make decisions as you go.
• You are a team player: You understand that being a member of a high-performing team requires you to contribute your best work, but also for you to help others contribute their best. You enjoy lending a helping hand when needed and levelling up those around you.

Tech stack

Below is a detailed breakdown of all the technologies we use. We do not require you to have experience in all these technologies as long as you are open to learning. We currently use Python and Typescript across our codebase. Prior experience in these or similar technologies is appreciated but not required.

- Backend: Python and Rust
- Frontend: Typescript and React
- Kubernetes for deployment
- GCP for underlying infrastructure
- Database technologies: PostgreSQL, Clickhouse

What We Offer

- Competitive salary, commission and equity in a hyper growth AI company.
- Strong in-person culture: most of our team is in the office 3+ days a week.
- Room to grow into anything you choose — a year ago we were 50 people, now we're 100+. We'll be growing insanely fast over the next 24 months and you'll have all the opportunities for growth as you can handle.
- 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays.

Encord offers a unique opportunity to be part of a startup with a clear mission and vision - AI alignment. We are partnering with frontier AI labs, scale-ups raising billions in capital, and some of the world’s largest companies. AI will be the most impactful technology of our time. If you want to join us and work at the forefront of what’s possible in AI then please get in touch