Software Engineer, Databases

Our mission is to architect AI that learns from and interacts with the world like humans do.

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.

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.

• 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

• 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

• 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

🏢 In-office policy: We’re an in-person team based out of offices in 🇺🇸 San Francisco, 🇬🇧 London and 🇮🇳 Bangalore We love being in the office, hanging out together, and learning from each other every day.