Full-Time
Software Engineer
Systems
Spiral
11-50 employees
Open-source columnar DB with emergent schema
Compensation Overview
£150k/yr
London, UK
In Person
The role is in-person at the London office; the posting also names New York City and San Francisco offices.
 Software Engineering (1) |
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- At least 5 years of experience writing high-quality production code.
- A strong foundation in operating systems and systems programming.
- A proven track record in performance engineering.
- Willingness to work in person at the New York City, San Francisco, or London office.
- Familiarity with Apache Arrow, Parquet, DataFusion, ClickHouse, or DuckDB.
- Understanding of the machine learning infrastructure stack, such as PyTorch and CUDA.
- Experience with Rust.
Spiral offers Vortex, an open-source columnar database format that stores diverse data types, including large objects like images and videos, within tabular data. It uses an emergent schema that lets users add columns and enrich data without rewriting existing data, enabling scalability to millions of columns. The system relies on a forest of LSM trees and object storage to deliver effectively unlimited capacity, and it emphasizes fast performance through features like cell push-down, aiming to outperform traditional columnar formats in analytics workloads. Its goal is to provide a high-performance, flexible data platform with strong storage–compute integration and interoperability, including tight Apache Arrow integration and planned Apache Iceberg support, under a bring-your-own-compute model.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
Series A
Total Funding
$22M
Headquarters
New York City, New York
Founded
2023
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Spiral raised $22 million from Amplify and General Catalyst in September 2025.
- OpenXData 2026 showed 18x faster scans and broader GPU-native interest.
- Microsoft, Snowflake, and Palantir backing the Vortex project legitimizes market demand.
What critics are saying
- DuckDB shipped Vortex support in January 2026, commoditizing Spiral's format advantage.
- Parquet, Iceberg, and DuckDB keep absorbing adjacent features, shrinking Spiral's wedge.
- Without durable enterprise adoption beyond open-source momentum, Spiral risks becoming a feature, not a company.
What makes Spiral unique
- Vortex is Linux Foundation-hosted, giving Spiral neutral governance and ecosystem credibility.
- Spiral targets multimodal data, unifying images, video, embeddings, tables, and text.
- GPU-native storage and direct S3-to-GPU reads distinguish Spiral from Parquet-centric stacks.
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Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 0%1 year growth
↑ 0%2 year growth
↑ 5%Gunderson Dettmer advises Spiral, a data infrastructure company, in its emergence from stealth mode and its $22 million Seed and Series A financing led by Amplify and General Catalyst.