Hands-on Engineering Manager, Rust & Systems Scalable DB

About Us

At Lang Chain, our mission is to make intelligent agents ubiquitous. We build the foundation for agent engineering in the real world, helping developers move from prototypes to production-ready AI agents that teams can rely on. We began as widely adopted open-source tools and have grown to also offer a platform for building, evaluating, deploying, and operating agents at scale.

With $125M raised at Series B from IVP, Sequoia, Benchmark, CapitalG, and Sapphire Ventures, we’re at a stage where we’re continuing to develop new products, growth is accelerating, and all team members have meaningful impact on what we build and how we work together. Lang Chain is a place where your contributions can shape how this technology shows up in the real world.

Today, our platform includes Lang Smith (Observability, Evaluation, Deployment, Fleet, and Sandboxes), our open source frameworks (Lang Chain, Lang Graph, and Deep Agents), and the newly launched Lang Smith Engine for autonomous agent improvement. We have 100M+ monthly open source downloads, 6,000+ active Lang Smith customers, and 5 of the Fortune 10 use Lang Smith in production (+ 35% of the Fortune 500 overall), including teams at Klarna, Clay, Coinbase, Workday, Lyft, Cloudflare, Harvey, Rippling, Vanta, Linked In, , Nvidia, and Bridgewater.

About the team

SmithDB is Lang Chain's internal database team. We're building a storage and query layer purpose-built for AI observability and evaluation. Within six months we went from idea to a production system that offers industry leading performance and scalability for agent observability data. We're a small, fast team of systems engineers tackling genuinely hard problems: storage layout, query execution, compaction, and scaling toward trillions of agent traces.

We develop in Rust, run on Kubernetes, and integrate tightly with S3/GCS/Azure Blob. There are no legacy constraints; this is a greenfield system with real production load and ambitious engineering goals.

About the role

We're looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead the SmithDB team. This is not a pure people-management role. You'll write production code, review PRs at the systems level, make architectural calls, and be in the weeds alongside your engineers. At the same time, you'll own team health, hiring, technical roadmap, and coordination with the broader Lang Smith platform. The ideal candidate has deep systems or database engineering experience and genuinely prefers to stay technical while growing a team.

What you'll do

• Write and review production Rust code across ingestion, query execution, and storage layers

• Lead architectural decisions on storage format, compaction, indexing, and query planning

• Drive performance investigations using memory and CPU profiling tools; own the path from profiling to shipped fix

• Design and harden the distributed deployment of SmithDB services on Kubernetes (multi-tenant, high-throughput, low-latency)

• Contribute to cloud object store integrations (S3, GCS, Azure Blob) and set the standard for how SmithDB manages data at rest and in flight

• Build and maintain observability for the engine itself: metrics, tracing, debug tooling

• Manage a small but growing team of systems engineers: set goals, run 1:1s, provide technical mentorship, and grow careers

• Own the SmithDB technical roadmap in partnership with Lang Smith product and engineering leadership

• Communicate progress, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to the broader organization: you write concise, decision-ready updates

What you'll bring

• 7+ years in systems or database engineering, with at least 2 years in a technical lead or engineering management role

• Production Rust experience — you can write it, review it, and have opinions on how to structure it at scale

• Dee…