Senior Software Engineer

About the role

ABOUT LANCEDB

LanceDB http://lancedb.com/ is the preeminent data platform for multimodal AI use cases. From hyper-scalable vector search to advanced retrieval for RAG, from streaming training data to interactive exploration of large-scale AI datasets, LanceDB is the best foundation for your AI application, and powers some of the most groundbreaking applications and challenging requirements today.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help expand the reach of Lance and LanceDB within the broader data infrastructure ecosystem. You’ll work at the intersection of high-performance computing, big data, and open-source systems. You will contribute scale and performance improvements, integrations with the wider data and AI ecosystem, simplifying distributed operations, and usability and maintainability enhancements.

YOU’LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR

- Designing and maintaining efficient distributed Lance dataset operations

- Building efficient indices to enable predicate pushdown and accelerate queries in Spark, Ray, or Trino

- Working on table formats, data encodings, and various aspects of the Lance format in Rust

- Driving open-source community efforts to integrate the Lance format with Spark, Hive Metastore, Presto, Trino, Ray, and other data infrastructure systems

- Operating and improving internal data processing infrastructure

- Promoting the Lance format in open-source communities and at Big Data conferences

REQUIREMENTS

- 10+ years of experience building high-performance databases, big data systems, or large-scale data services

- Deep understanding of internals of open-source Big Data or AI training systems (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Flink, Ray, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, ClickHouse, Trino, Presto, PyTorch, or JAX)

- Strong experience with high-performance computing in C++, Java, and/or Scala

- Experience with Rust (or willingness to learn it)

- Proven ability to move fast, work independently, and collaborate with a high-caliber team

NICE TO HAVE

- Contributor, committer, or PMC member in Apache or other large open-source projects

- Experience with Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Parquet, Iceberg, or Delta Lake

- Track record of driving large features or integrations in distributed systems

- Strong community presence and passion for open-source collaboration

WHAT WE OFFER

- A key role shaping an open-source project with real production usage

- Remote-first team with flexible hours

- Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits

- Generous learning budget and support for open-source contributions

WHY JOIN US

You’ll join a world-class team of open-source builders, including co-authors of pandas, and contributors to HDFS, Arrow, Iceberg, and HBase. You’ll collaborate on systems that power next-generation AI workloads while shaping how LanceDB operates and scales production environments.