Senior Database Engineer

Senior Database Engineer

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Hybrid/Remote

Surreal

DB is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for our core database team. Based in London or US East Coast
, you'll work on the hardest problems in database design - query optimization, storage engines, and execution performance - shipping improvements that directly impact production workloads. You'll be essential to making Surreal

DB faster, smarter, and more capable.

• Design and implement query planner improvements, index selection algorithms, and storage engine optimizations.
• Profile production workloads, identify bottlenecks, and ship performance fixes that make measurable differences.
• Build new database features - indexing strategies, execution engine refinements, query optimization techniques.
• Collaborate with engineering and product to prioritize features users actually need.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions when theory meets reality.
• Review code, engage with the open-source community, and mentor engineers.
• Jump into ancillary systems (cloud infrastructure, SDKs) when needed to unblock progress.

• Deep expertise in database internals—query optimization, indexing, storage engines, or transaction processing
• Experience shipping production database systems or meaningful time in database research
• Fluent in Rust, comfortable with systems languages, pragmatic about using the right tool for the job.
• Strong understanding of performance tradeoffs and when to optimize vs. ship
• Track record of shipping code people depend on, balancing correctness, performance, and maintainability
• Excited by hard problems: smarter query planners, faster hot paths, index structures that work for real workloads
• Comfortable making technical decisions with incomplete information in a fast-paced environment
• Equally at home reading papers and profiling production systems.
• Database experience is valuable but not required - if you're a strong systems engineer who gets excited about optimization problems and wants to go deep on database internals, we would love to hear from you.

We understand that each candidate brings a unique set of skills and experiences, and we encourage applicants to apply even if you do not meet all the qualifications listed in the job description.

Our London team have a hybrid working approach. We enjoy working and collaborating together, and require people to be in our Oxford Street office three days a week on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.