Employer listing
Senior Software Engineer, Database (SmithDB)
LangChain
San Francisco, Ca · on site · full time · Senior
$185,000 - $250,000
About Us
At LangChain, 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. Today, our platform includes LangSmith, our open source frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, and Deep Agents), and the newly launched LangSmith Engine for autonomous agent improvement.
About the Team
SmithDB is LangChain's internal database team. We're building a storage and query layer purpose-built for AI observability and evaluation. We're a small, fast team of systems engineers tackling 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 systems / database engineer to help design, optimize, and harden our system. You'll be working on execution, storage layout, performance profiling, and scaling to trillions of traces. This role is based in San Francisco.
What You'll Do
- Engineer performant Rust code for ingestion and query execution
- Optimize for cost and speed, heavily utilizing memory and CPU profiling
- Integrate tightly with cloud object stores (S3/GCS/Azure Blob)
- Deploy our distributed database services on Kubernetes (multi-tenant, high throughput, low latency)
- Contribute to observability for the storage engine itself (metrics, tracing, debug tooling)
What You'll Bring
- 5+ years in systems/database engineering with strong experience in a systems programming language (Rust, C++). Rust strongly preferred, as it is the language we use.
- Knowledge of database internals is a plus: query engines, storage systems, indexing, and compaction
- Proficiency in systems performance analysis: memory allocation, CPU hotspots, lock contention, async runtimes
- Familiarity with similar query execution engines is a plus
- Experience with Kubernetes, distributed systems, and cloud object storage is a plus
- Strong fundamentals in networking, OS concepts, and systems debugging
Benefits
Medical, dental, and vision coverage, flexible vacation, a 401(k) plan, meaningful equity, and meals on in-office days in the US.