Technical Lead - Data Engines

We are looking for a technical leader to serve as the Technical Lead for the Data Engines group. The Technical Lead position is not a purely managerial role, but instead its a software development technical leadership role with managerial responsibilities. You should expect your time to be split evenly between management/lead responsibilities and hands-on coding. You'll have the opportunity to work directly and manage a team working on Theseus, the accelerator-native data processing engine built for composability. You will lead a team at Voltron Data building, optimizing and maintaining our data execution framework, adding new features, making it run faster and more scalable and even contributing to new core architectural components that will enable the engine to run at Petabyte scale.

 Why work at Voltron Data?

• We are Going for Impact: We are a Series A, venture-backed startup assembling a global team to design next-generation data systems, creating a new foundation for data processing built on composable open standards, with Theseus, our GPU query engine for petabyte-scale ETL, harnessing the speed and efficiency of modern hardware. 

• We are Committed to Bridging Open Source Communities: We are a collection of open source maintainers who have been driving open source ecosystems over the last 15 years, particularly in the C++, Python, and R programming ecosystems.

• We are Building a Diverse, Inclusive Company:  We are creating a representative, equitable, and respectful workplace that prioritizes employee growth. Everyone at Voltron Data is bought into the company’s success; all voices are critical to shaping the organization’s future.

Timeline:

Below is a rough timeline of where you can expect to be at different points during your career path starting in this position. Note that you would not immediately be leading a team, but instead you would be expected to spend at least 4 months doing hands-on development to learn about Theseus and how it works, before you would be expected to lead a team of 3 to 6 people. 

Upon Joining:

• Spending time learning about the Apache Arrow,  the compute primitives we use in Theseus, the query parser and optimizer and other foundational components.

• Diving into the data processing engine architecture, how all the different components interact with each other and how data flows through the compute graph. 

• Understanding memory management mechanics, including spilling memory from GPU, to Host and Disk.

• Learning and embracing the software development culture at Voltron Data.

Within a month:

• Profiling single node and distributed queries executions and analyzing the engine telemetry to better understand how the engine works and how to solve distributed engine issues.

• Diving deep into the various distributed relational algebra algorithms to understand how they work and how they can be improved.

• Working with the team on fixing bugs, implementing simple optimizations or code refactoring projects.

Within 6 months:

• You would start to transition into a leadership role, first by leading a project with one or two more people.

• Projects might involve:

  • Building new relational algebra components to expand SQL coverage or DataFrame functionality coverage 

  • Making small improvements to more sophisticated engine components such as resource management, task scheduling, and fault tolerance.

Within 12 months:

Management aspect:

• You will be in charge of your own team of 3 to 6 people. 

• You will be expected to manage team tasks and projects, set priorities and help drive towards timelines as necessary. 

• You will have the opportunity to provide mentorship and technical guidance to your team members and also communicate project statuses to the upper management or across other teams.

• Management responsibilities are not expected to take all of your time, so you will still have time to work on interesting and challenging projects. 

Technical aspect:

• Proposing and implementing core architecture improvements to the engine.

• Working on challenging tasks such as language agnostic user defined functions, multi-query concurrency, and multi-tenancy.

• Integrating the engine with other components and features developed by other teams in the company to provide enterprise grade customer experiences.

Previous experience that could be helpful:

• Experience with data processing engines or frameworks

• Experience in distributed and multi-threaded systems

• Experience in HW resource management including memory and thread pools 

• Working with SQL and non-SQL systems and their computational abstractions

• Developing in C++, especially using modern C++

• Developing for multiple types of hardware (i.e. CPU, GPU)

• Experience leading and managing a software development team

US Compensation -  The salary range for this role is between $205,000.00 to $250,000.00. We have a global market-based pay structure which varies by location. Please note that the base pay range is a guideline and for candidates who receive an offer, the exact base pay will vary based on factors such as actual work location, skills and experience of the candidate. This position is also eligible for additional incentives such as equity awards.