Rust Jobs for Rustaceans

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.

About the Role
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.

Key Responsibilities:

• 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

Who We Are Looking For

• 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

Requirements:

• 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

Your first 90-days

• 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

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.