Director of Engineering

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.

Our Yugabeings (distributed, like our database) span 12+ countries and multiple time zones, sharing expertise from diverse backgrounds and industries.

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.

• 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.

• 10+ years of progressive software development experience, with at least 3+ years in a Director role managing multiple teams or critical product areas.
• 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).
• 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.
• Hands-on experience in systems programming languages, particularly C/C++ and Go.
• Direct experience resolving performance bottlenecks (e.g., range scans, nested loop joins) and re-architecting systems for massive scaling (e.g., separating log/data, multi-writer architectures).

• Experience with PostgreSQL internals or PostgreSQL-compatible distributed databases.
• Hands-on experience with modern public cloud infrastructure and cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and Prometheus.
• Familiarity with NoSQL databases.
• Contributions to open-source database projects, patents, or successfully integrating research concepts (e.g., ML-based anomaly detection) into products.
• Experience with technologies common in the Yugabyte ecosystem, such as Apache Bookkeeper, Spark, Kafka, or other NoSQL/Graph databases (e.g., Neo4J).

We work in a hybrid model, with the team together in our Sunnyvale office 2–3 days per week.

We feel strongly about equal pay for equal work, and transparency in compensation is one way to help achieve that. The cash compensation for this role is market competitive, with a range of USD 220,000-USD 250,000, inclusive of variable/incentive for some roles. As well as equity (when applicable), and benefits including health plans, retirement plans, and unlimited paid time off (PTO).