Director of Engineering - Core Database

Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB, the AI-ready, multi-modal, distributed PostgreSQL database for cloud-native apps. Trusted by industry leaders including Shopify, Paramount+, GM, Kroger, Fiserv, and NPCI, YugabyteDB has been deployed in over 100 countries and powers more than 5 million clusters worldwide.

Together, our hard-working team of experts and our industry-leading technology are uniquely positioned to meet the demands of modern workloads: geo-distributed, ultra-resilient, and built to scale without limits.

Our Yugabeings (distributed, like our database) span 12+ countries and multiple time zones, sharing expertise from diverse backgrounds and industries.

Yugabyte is seeking an experienced Director of Engineering to lead the teams building the core of YugabyteDB, our distributed SQL database. You will drive the architecture, development, and delivery of the transactional, storage, replication, and consensus layers that make YugabyteDB fast, scalable, and resilient. You will also hire, mentor, and grow a world-class engineering team.

You don't need to have built a database before. We're looking for leaders who have built and run large-scale, highly available distributed systems. That could be a database or storage engine, but it could also be distributed storage, streaming and messaging platforms, consensus-based infrastructure, or cloud control and data planes. If you understand replication, consistency, failure handling, and performance at scale, our senior architects and database experts will help you learn the database-specific parts.

This role combines hands-on architectural judgment, large-scale systems design, and the ability to execute against an ambitious product roadmap.

Role and Responsibilities

• Technical Strategy & Architecture: Define and drive the technical roadmap for core components: the storage engine (LSM/RocksDB), the distributed transaction layer, Raft-based consensus, and multi-region replication (xCluster).
• Engineering Execution: Own end-to-end development, quality, performance, and operational excellence for your teams' components, which run in cloud-native environments such as Kubernetes.
• Team Leadership & Mentorship: Recruit, mentor, and manage high-performing engineering teams. Build a culture of deep technical ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Scaling & Reliability: Lead work on write scaling, concurrency, cache coherency, and 99.995% availability in distributed, multi-tenant, cloud-native environments.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with Product Management, technical leadership (TDs/CTO), and other engineering teams (Query, QA) to define requirements and deliver integrated features.

Required Experience

• Leadership: 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading a team or a critical product area as a Director or senior engineering manager.
• Has led teams that build large-scale backend distributed systems, and owned the architecture and the outcomes, not just the operations.
• Strong technical judgment: sets technical direction, raises the bar on design and correctness, and makes clear tradeoffs across reliability, performance and speed of delivery.
• Owns production quality end to end, from customer escalations to incident learnings to lasting fixes, and builds a culture where the team does the same.
• Builds and scales high-performing teams: hires and develops senior and staff engineers, grows future leaders, and gives clear, direct feedback.
• Delivers multi-quarter roadmaps across teams and time zones, aligns with product and partner teams, and keeps execution predictable
• Deep systems background, in either of these:
• Distributed systems: You have designed and delivered internet-scale, highly available distributed systems. Relevant areas include replication, consensus (Raft/Paxos), distributed transactions or locking, partitioning, failure detection and recovery, and storage or streaming infrastructure. Or:
• Database or storage internals: You have built core components of a database or storage engine, such as storage/access layers, logging and recovery, concurrency control, indexing, or LSM trees.
• Systems Programming: Hands-on background in C/C++ (strongly preferred) or a comparable systems language such as Go, Rust, or Java, with comfort reviewing performance-critical code.
• Performance at Scale: A track record of diagnosing bottlenecks and re-architecting systems for higher throughput, lower latency, or larger scale.

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• YugabyteDB/PostgreSQL: Direct experience with PostgreSQL internals or a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database is a significant advantage.
• Knowledge of NoSQL databases.
• Open Source & Research: History of contributing to open-source database projects, holding relevant patents, or successfully assimilating deep research concepts (e.g., ML-based anomaly detection, deep learning systems) into product.
• Has led teams building database or storage internals, such as storage engines (LSM / RocksDB), query processing and execution, or transactions and concurrency control.
• Has shipped data path capabilities like replication, CDC, or backup and restore to enterprise customers.
• Has run a product where upgrade safety, backward compatibility and release quality are non-negotiable.
• Data Technologies: Experience with technologies common in the Yugabyte ecosystem, such as Apache Bookkeeper, Spark, Kafka, or other NoSQL/Graph databases (e.g., Neo4J).

We work in a hybrid model, with the team together in our Sunnyvale office 2–3 days per week.

We feel strongly about equal pay for equal work, and transparency in compensation is one way to help achieve that. The cash compensation for this role is market competitive, with a range of USD 220,000-USD 250,000, inclusive of variable/incentive for some roles. As well as equity (when applicable), and benefits including health plans, retirement plans, and unlimited paid time off (PTO). The pay range for this position is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. The actual pay will vary based on factors including experience, qualifications, and skill level.

Regarding visa sponsorship: Due to recent changes in U.S. immigration policy, we’re currently unable to sponsor new H-1B visas for candidates outside the United States. We’re happy to consider candidates who need an H-1B transfer or extension, as well as candidates in the U.S. on F-1 status (including CPT or OPT) who would need to change to H-1B status. Candidates with other types of valid work authorization are also welcome to apply.