Posted at: 30 October
Senior Software Engineer, Vector Indexing
Company
LanceDB
LanceDB is an open-source, serverless vector database designed for fast, scalable billion-scale vector search, primarily serving the AI and machine learning industry with a B2B focus.
Remote Hiring Policy:
LanceDB is a remote-first team that supports flexible work hours, hiring from various regions to accommodate a diverse workforce.
Job Type
Full-time
Allowed Applicant Locations
Worldwide
Salary
$180,000 to $235,000 per year
Job Description
About LanceDB
LanceDB is a developer-friendly, open-source data lake for multimodal AI. From hyper-scalable vector search to advanced retrieval for RAG, from streaming training data to interactive exploration of large-scale AI datasets, LanceDB is the best foundation for your AI application, and powers some of the most groundbreaking applications and challenging requirements today.
About the Role
We’re looking for a Software Engineer focused on Vector Indexing to help build the next generation of vector-native data infrastructure. You’ll work on high-performance indexing and search systems at the core of LanceDB, enabling scalable similarity search, full-text search, and flexible indexing for the open-source and enterprise communities alike.
You’ll be responsible for:
- Designing, building, and maintaining core vector indexing and search components 
- Implementing GPU-accelerated indexing algorithms and performance optimizations 
- Maintaining and evolving vector index algorithms, including pruning, quantization, and graph-based methods 
- Developing and optimizing full-text search capabilities and integrations 
- Benchmarking, profiling, and tuning performance across varied workloads 
- Writing and maintaining documentation, benchmarks, tutorials, and blog posts to support and grow adoption 
- Engaging with the open-source community: reviewing contributions, triaging issues, and joining design discussions 
Requirements
- Strong proficiency in Rust 
- Experience designing or implementing vector search or indexing algorithms (e.g., HNSW, IVF, PQ, quantization, clustering) 
- Proficiency in C for GPU-related development 
- Familiarity with GPU acceleration frameworks (CUDA, ROCm, etc.) 
- Demonstrated ability to benchmark, profile, and optimize system performance 
- Excellent written communication and documentation skills 
- Comfortable collaborating in open-source environments 
Nice to Have
- Understanding of full-text search systems (Lucene, Elasticsearch, Tantivy, etc.) 
- Experience building or maintaining data systems, databases, or search engines 
- Familiarity with distributed systems and scale-out architecture 
- Background in web APIs, embedding serving, or real-time systems 
- Contributions to or maintenance of open-source projects 
What We Offer
- A key role shaping an open-source project with real production usage 
- Remote-first team with flexible hours 
- Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits 
- Generous learning budget and support for open-source contributions 
About the LanceDB Team
LanceDB was created by experts with decades of experience building tools for data science and machine learning. From co-authors of pandas to Apache PMC members of HDFS, Arrow, and Delta, the LanceDB team has created open-source tools used by millions worldwide.
Compensation Range: $180K - $235K