Director of Engineering, Core Database

Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB , the AI-ready, multi-modal, distributed PostgreSQL database for cloud-native apps. Trusted by industry leaders including Shopify, Paramount+, GM, Kroger, Fiserv, and NPCI, YugabyteDB has been deployed in over 100 countries and powers more than 5 million clusters worldwide. Together, our hard-working team of experts and our industry-leading technology are uniquely positioned to meet the demands of modern workloads: geo-distributed, ultra-resilient, and built to scale without limits. Our Yugabeings (distributed, like our database) span 12+ countries and multiple time zones, sharing expertise from diverse backgrounds and industries. Director of Engineering, Core Database Yugabyte is seeking an experienced and accomplished Director of Engineering to lead key aspects of our distributed SQL database development. This leader will drive the architecture, development, and delivery of core transactional, storage, and distributed systems components, ensuring YugabyteDB maintains industry-leading performance, scalability, and resilience. They will also manage and mentor our growing team. This role requires a mix of software architecture expertise to design and implement practical solutions, as well as the ability to work closely with developers to identify patterns and tools that simplify solution building. You will lead one or more critical engineering teams focused on the heart of YugabyteDB, bringing technical depth in database internals and distributed systems to mentor and grow a world-class engineering organization. This position demands a blend of hands-on architectural expertise, large-scale systems design, and the ability to execute against an ambitious product roadmap, with a deep understanding of transactional databases, distributed systems, and microservice-based applications. Role and Responsibilities Technical Strategy & Architecture: Define and drive the technical roadmap and architecture for core database components, including the storage engine (LSM/RocksDB), transactional layer, distributed consensus (RAFT), and multi-master replication (xCluster). Engineering Execution: Own the end-to-end development, quality, performance, and operational excellence of your teams' components, ensuring deployment in cloud-native environments (e.g., Kubernetes). Team Leadership & Mentorship: Recruit, mentor, and manage high-performing engineering teams. Foster a culture of deep technical ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Systems Scaling & Reliability: Lead projects focused on write scaling, improving concurrency (e.g., DDL concurrency), ensuring cache coherency, and achieving 99.995% availability in distributed, multi-tenant, cloud-native environments. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Product Management, Technical Leadership (TDs/CTO), and other engineering teams (Query Optimizer, QA) to define requirements and deliver integrated, impactful features. Required Experience The ideal candidate will have demonstrated senior leadership in domains directly applicable to distributed databases: Experience: 10+ years of progressive software development experience, with at least 3+ years in a Director role managing multiple teams or critical product areas. Database Internals Expertise: Substantial experience designing and developing core components of production-grade relational or distributed database engines (e.g., storage/access layer, buffer cache, logging, recovery, lock management, indexing, LSM). Distributed Systems & Cloud-Native Architectures: Proven ability to design and deliver internet-scale, highly available, multi-tenant distributed systems, leveraging technologies such as Service Fabric, distributed lock managers, distributed transaction managers, and cloud object storage. Core Programming Languages: Hands-on experience in systems programming languages, particularly C/C++ and Go. Scalability and Performance: Direct experience resolving performance bott…