Software Engineer, Databases
About Cartesia
Our mission is to build the next generation of AI: ubiquitous, interactive intelligence that runs wherever you are. Today, not even the best models can continuously process and reason over a year-long stream of audio, video and text—1B text tokens, 10B audio tokens and 1T video tokens—let alone do this on-device.
We're pioneering the model architectures that will make this possible. Our founding team met as PhDs at the Stanford AI Lab, where we invented State Space Models or SSMs, a new primitive for training efficient, large-scale foundation models. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering paired with a design-minded product engineering team to build and ship cutting edge models and experiences.
We're funded by leading investors at Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with Factory, Conviction, A Star, General Catalyst, SV Angel, Databricks and others. We're fortunate to have the support of many amazing advisors, and 90+ angels across many industries, including the world's foremost experts in AI.
About the Role
Cartesia is hiring a Software Engineer, Databases to architect Cartesia’s data systems for the next orders of magnitude of scale, implement data governance, and empower engineers and non-engineers with easy, secure database tooling and access.
Your Impact
Develop and evolve database platforms to support 100x+ scale while preserving strong guarantees around uptime, latency, and correctness
Design data storage architectures that operate smoothly across AWS, GCP, on-prem / first-party infrastructure, third-party deployments, and additional environments
Enable faster development across the company by providing engineers and non-engineers alike with high-quality, reliable database tooling and primitives
Create and deploy secure access control mechanisms so sensitive data is only accessible by authorized users
Build scalable data governance systems for permissions, auditing, and compliance (e.g., data residency), including IAM policies, ACLs, and security controls used across thousands of users and services
What You Bring
Strong proficiency with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, along with infrastructure-as-code tooling like Terraform
A track record of taking database systems through periods of extreme growth at fast-scaling organizations
4+ years of industry experience, including 2+ years owning or leading large, complex technical initiatives as an engineer or tech lead
Deep hands-on experience operating and scaling databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, DynamoDB, or comparable systems
Experience designing and running database infrastructure in multi-cloud or hybrid environments
Familiarity with database automation, orchestration, and operational tooling at significant scale
Nice-to-Haves
Experience working with Redis, Temporal, vector databases, or asynchronous/background job systems
Strong understanding of database internals and data systems — including storage engines, indexing, query execution, and related topics — is a bonus but not required
Previous experience at organizations with a strong reputation for database or data-infrastructure engineering
Our Culture
🏢 We’re an in-person team based out of San Francisco. We love being in the office, hanging out together, and learning from each other every day.
🚢 We ship fast. All of our work is novel and cutting edge, and execution speed is paramount. We have a high bar, and we don’t sacrifice quality or design along the way.
🤝 We support each other. We have an open & inclusive culture that’s focused on giving everyone the resources they need to succeed.