Founding Engineer - Data Infrastructure, Snowflake, Trino, DuckDB
An early-stage startup is seeking a Founding Engineer to design and build the core technology powering a next-generation data platform. You’ll work directly with the founding team to shape the architecture, choose the right tools, and take ownership of mission-critical technical milestones.
What you’ll do
- Design and refine core logic for routing queries to multiple engines (e.g., Snowflake, DuckDB, Trino, ClickHouse) based on cost, performance, and freshness
- Develop systems to expose and serialize query engine plans for consistent use across multiple environments
- Build automated benchmarking suites to compare latency, throughput, and cost across engines on real-world workloads
- Create and maintain APIs for simulating and testing query engine behavior
- Contribute to a storage layer optimized for Iceberg tables, enabling high-performance ad-hoc analytics
- Build frameworks to ensure data integrity across distributed query engines
- Scale infrastructure to handle demanding distributed systems workloads
What will help you succeed
- Experience in data engineering, warehousing, distributed systems, and infrastructure development
- Familiarity with cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, Dremio, ClickHouse, etc.
- Understanding of Lakehouse architectures such as Iceberg, Hudi, and Delta Lake
- Skills in ETL, data modeling, database optimization, and query engine performance tuning
- Strong programming background in Python, Rust, or Java
- Experience in early-stage startups and building from the ground up
