(USA) Staff, Software Engineer

About the Role

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build a custom in-memory + on-disk vector database engine optimized for sub-millisecond latency at scale.
• Architect a native caching solution from scratch to support concurrent lookups and evictions with strong consistency guarantees.
• Handle concurrent LLM queries via efficient scheduling or batching techniques with the vector DB of choice.
• Partner with ML engineers to ingest, index, and retrieve vector embeddings from multimodal signals (audio, frame-level video).
• Profile and fine-tune for low memory usage, disk I/O throughput, and multi-core CPU parallelism.
• Collaborate with product, infra, and ad delivery teams to integrate with data pipelines, contextual matching, and real-time bidding systems.
• Build and iterate on POCs quickly to test, validate and scale new architectural ideas.

Requirements

• 8+ years of hands-on backend/systems experience with Rust, C/C++, Go Lang or Python.
• Proven track record of building or contributing to databases, key-value stores, caching systems, or search engines.
• Strong understanding of memory models, lock-free/concurrent data structures, and efficient serialization (e.g., protobuf, flatbuffers).
• Experience integrating vector DBs (e.g., FAISS, Milvus, Vespa, Pinecone) or building custom ANN libraries.
• Experience optimizing workloads on resource-constrained devices, with attention to latency.
• Deep knowledge of vector similarity search, ANN techniques, and index compression.
• Comfortable operating in high-throughput, low-latency ad-serving environments.

Nice to Have

• Contributions to open-source projects or patents in vector indexing, caching, or embedded DBs.
• Understanding of real-time ML inference, ML Ops, or LLM-enhanced retrieval in production.
• Familiarity with CTV ad pipelines, SSAI, frame fingerprinting, or video scene detection.

Qualifications

• Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 4 years' experience in software engineering or related area.
• Option 2: 6 years' experience in software engineering or related area.
• Preferred: Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computer Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related area and 2 years' experience in software engineering or related area.

Benefits & Perks

• Incentive awards for performance.
• 401(k) match, stock purchase plan.
• Paid maternity and parental leave, PTO, and multiple health plans.
• Health benefits including medical, vision, and dental coverage.
• Paid time off including sick leave, parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty, and voting.
• Short-term and long-term disability, company discounts, Military Leave Pay, adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement.
• Walmart-paid education benefit program (Live Better U).