Senior Software Engineer, Database Systems

Zilliz is a fast-growing startup developing the industry’s leadingvector database for enterprise-grade AI. Founded by the engineers behind Milvus, the world’s most popularopen-source vector database, the company builds next-generation database technologies to help organizations quickly create AI applications. On a mission to democratize AI, Zilliz is committed to simplifying data management for AI applications and making vector databases accessible to every organization.

The Database Systems team builds the core engine behind Milvus and Zilliz Cloud Vector Lakebase; spanning storage, query execution, indexing, load balancing, resource management, and distributed system architecture. We build the next generation of vector databases around three Natives:

For this team, scalability, performance, cost efficiency, and reliability are the core engineering goals.

Zilliz is a fast-growing startup developing the industry’s leadingvector database for enterprise-grade AI. Founded by the engineers behind Milvus, the world’s most popularopen-source vector database, the company builds next-generation database technologies to help organizations quickly create AI applications. On a mission to democratize AI, Zilliz is committed to simplifying data management for AI applications and making vector databases accessible to every organization.

The Database Systems team builds the core engine behind Milvus and Zilliz Cloud Vector Lakebase; spanning storage, query execution, indexing, load balancing, resource management, and distributed system architecture. We build the next generation of vector databases around three Natives:

• AI-Native:
  Born for AI and Agent workloads, with native support for vector data and semantic retrieval
• Cloud-Native:
  Designed for elastic scaling and large-scale operation in the cloud
• Lake-Native:
  Built on a data-lake architecture that works naturally with data at massive scale

For this team, scalability, performance, cost efficiency, and reliability are the core engineering goals.

• Design and build core modules of Milvus and Vector Lakebase, including storage, query engine, indexing, load balancing, resource management, and distributed execution
• Drive the evolution of the engine architecture, bringing Lake-native capabilities, elastic scaling, and large-scale multi-tenancy into production to support the next stage of growth
• Design database capabilities for AI and Agent workloads, handling more complex access patterns, higher concurrency, larger scale, and lower latency
• Own the stability of Zilliz Cloud, working closely with cloud platform and product engineering teams to bring engine capabilities into production and using real customer scenarios to drive engine improvements
• Iterate on AI developer tooling, bringing AI into the engineering workflow to improve team velocity and system observability
• Contribute to the Milvus open-source community through design docs, code, code reviews, and technical discussions

• 3+ years of experience building database systems, distributed systems, storage engines, query engines, search systems, or large-scale data infrastructure
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Strong systems programming ability in one or more of C++, Go, or Rust
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and database internals, including consistency, scalability, performance, fault tolerance, query execution, storage, indexing, resource management, and engineering tradeoffs
• Strong engineering taste: the ability to judge what design is simpler, what abstraction will last, and which performance and cost tradeoffs actually matter
• Experience with large-scale cloud-native databases,…