About LanceDB
AI advances at the speed of its research, and research moves at the speed of its data. LanceDB is the AI-native Multimodal Lakehouse: one system where a researcher curates petabytes of video, audio, and every signal derived from them with a few lines of Python, and the next training run starts as fast as the next idea. Customers like Runway, Midjourney, and Netflix build the future of AI on LanceDB, from frontier and world models to robots and autonomous vehicles.
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help expand the reach of Lance and LanceDB within the broader data infrastructure ecosystem. You'll work at the intersection of high-performance computing, big data, and open-source systems. You will contribute scale and performance improvements, integrations with the wider data and AI ecosystem, simplifying distributed operations, and usability and maintainability enhancements.
Designing and maintaining efficient distributed Lance dataset operationsBuilding efficient indices to enable predicate pushdown and accelerate queries in Spark, Ray, or TrinoWorking on table formats, data encodings, and various aspects of the Lance format in RustDriving open-source community efforts to integrate the Lance format with Spark, Hive Metastore, Presto, Trino, Ray, and other data infrastructure systemsOperating and improving internal data processing infrastructurePromoting the Lance format in open-source communities and at Big Data conferences
What We're Looking For
10+ years of experience building high-performance databases, big data systems, or large-scale data servicesDeep understanding of internals of open-source Big Data or AI training systems (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Flink, Ray, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, ClickHouse, Trino, Presto, PyTorch, or JAX)Strong experience with high-performance computing in C++, Java, and/or ScalaExperience with Rust (or willingness to learn it)Proven ability to move fast, work independently, and collaborate with a high-caliber team
Contributor, committer, or PMC member in Apache or other large open-source projectsExperience with Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Parquet, Iceberg, or Delta LakeTrack record of driving large features or integrations in distributed systemsStrong community presence and passion for open-source collaboration