Senior Software Engineer, Core SQL

Redpanda Data is pioneering the Agentic Data Plane (ADP) in AI infrastructure. The Senior Software Engineer will focus on building a distributed SQL engine, optimizing SQL query execution, and ensuring high performance for analytical operations.

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with engineers who care deeply about their craft, take pride in what they deliver, and uphold a strong culture of technical excellence through thoughtful code reviews and collaboration
• Design, implement, and optimize high-performance SQL query execution algorithms and distributed SQL engine components using advanced optimization techniques (SIMD, cache-aware data structures, vectorization, structure-of-arrays layouts)
• Help ensure Redpanda's core tenets of Operational Simplicity, No Data Loss, and Blazingly Fast performance remains true as we scale analytical data workloads
• Measure, profile, and optimize code to achieve industry-leading query performance across diverse hardware architectures
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, SREs, support, and customer success to solve challenging distributed systems problems
• Drive delivery of an ambitious technical roadmap aligned with business goals for integrating high-performance analytics into Redpanda's data streaming platform
• Write comprehensive tests and documentation to ensure code quality, long-term maintainability, and knowledge sharing across the team
• Help shape Redpanda’s future while continuing to learn and grow as an engineer

Requirements:

• At least 5 years of relevant professional experience working on performance-critical systems
• Expert-level knowledge of modern C++ (ideally C++17 or C++20), including STL, memory management, and performance-oriented programming patterns
• Strong algorithmic foundation with proven ability to design and optimize complex data-processing algorithms
• Hands-on experience profiling, benchmarking, and performance tuning of production systems in Linux environments
• Deep understanding of parallel computing and concurrent programming, multi-threaded architectures, and synchronization primitives, along with familiarity with CPU architecture (cache hierarchies, memory bandwidth, branch prediction, instruction-level parallelism)
• Experience working on deeply technical systems involving scalability, concurrency, parallelism, and correctness
• Passion for building scalable, high-performance systems through systematic profiling, benchmarking and iterative optimization
• Pride in writing robust, well-abstracted code and a collaborative mindset that values feedback and code reviews
• Experience or interest in working with a fully distributed engineering team and contributing in open-source environments
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• C++ 20 experience
• Hands-on SIMD programming experience (e.g., AVX2, AVX-512, NEON, or similar)
• Familiarity with Apache Arrow, Parquet, or other columnar data formats
• Knowledge of SQL query optimization including cost-based optimization and execution strategies
• Experience with distributed database systems, distributed storage, and containerized deployment (Docker/Kubernetes)
• Python experience for testing frameworks, benchmarking tooling, or database client integrations