Senior Software Engineer, AI Data Systems, Database Infrastructure

Ambient Security

Senior Software Engineer responsible for database infrastructure design and scaling for AI systems at a leading physical security startup. Joining a dynamic team at a rapidly growing organization.

Posted 7/14/2026full-timeRedwood City • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $168,000 - $205,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in designing and operating scalable database infrastructure, with a focus on high availability, performance optimization, and data lifecycle management. Proficient in collaborating with cross-functional teams to support AI and backend infrastructure needs.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Database Infrastructure EngineeringRelational Database ManagementAnalytical Data Store ExperienceVector Database ProficiencyCloud Infrastructure Expertise

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

PostgreSQLMySQLAuroraClickHouseBigQueryRedisPythonKubernetesTerraformCI/CD

Soft Skills

CollaborationOwnership MindsetProblem-Solving

Tools & Technologies

CockroachDBVitessSnowflakeRedshiftPgvectorPineconeMilvusOpenSearchMonitoring ToolsIncident Response Systems

Industry Keywords

High-Availability EnvironmentsData Lifecycle ManagementOperational SafetyDisaster RecoveryData Access Patterns

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Amazon RedshiftBigQueryCloudDistributed SystemsGoKubernetesMySQLPostgresPythonRedisTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design, build, and operate scalable database infrastructure for mission-critical production and AI systems.
Scale relational, analytical, and vector data stores to support growing product, customer, and AI workloads.
Improve database performance across latency, throughput, availability, reliability, durability, and cost.
Own database architecture decisions around partitioning, sharding, replication, indexing, caching, query optimization, and data modeling.
Operate tier-0 data services with strong reliability, observability, incident response, and disaster recovery practices.
Build automation and tooling to improve database provisioning, migrations, monitoring, backups, failover, and capacity planning.
Partner with AI teams to support data infrastructure needs for embeddings, vector search, retrieval workflows, training data, model evaluation, and analytics.
Build low-latency data-serving patterns that power AI features in production
Work closely with engineering teams to design data access patterns that are scalable, reliable, and performant.
Identify bottlenecks in production systems and drive improvements across application, database, cache, and infrastructure layers.
Define and enforce best practices for schema design, database usage, data lifecycle management, and operational safety.
Help evolve our long-term data platform strategy as the company scales.

Requirements

What you’ll need

7+ years of industry experience in database infrastructure, backend infrastructure, distributed systems, or production platform engineering.
Deep hands-on experience operating and scaling production databases in high-availability environments.
Strong experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Aurora, CockroachDB, Vitess, or similar systems.
Experience with analytical data stores such as ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Druid, Pinot, or similar technologies.
Experience with vector databases or vector search systems such as pgvector, Pinecone, Milvus, OpenSearch, or similar systems.
Strong understanding of partitioning, sharding, replication, indexing, caching, query planning, and storage engine tradeoffs.
Proven ability to optimize systems for low latency, high availability, reliability, and operational simplicity.
Experience operating tier-0 or business-critical infrastructure services with strong uptime and reliability requirements.
Strong understanding of caching strategies using systems such as Redis, Memcached, CDN-backed caches, or application-level caching.
Experience with observability, monitoring, alerting, SLOs, capacity planning, and incident response for database systems.
Strong programming skills, ideally in Python, C++, Go, or similar languages.
Experience with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
Ability to collaborate effectively with backend, AI, product, security, and infrastructure teams.
Strong ownership mindset and ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs in complex production environments.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Comprehensive health + welfare package (Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, EAP, Legal Services, 401k plan)
Regular Full-time employees receive stock options for the opportunity to share ownership in the success of our company
Flexible time off to rest and recharge, including Winter Break (time off between Christmas and New Year’s for most roles, depending on customer demand)
The latest tech and awesome swag will be delivered to your door
Enjoy a full range of opportunities to connect with your awesome co-workers