Staff Engineer, Agentic Databases

Our Company:

At Teradata, we believe that people thrive when empowered with better information. Teradata Autonomous Knowledge Platform activates enterprise intelligence by unifying data, knowledge and business context to achieve tangible outcomes. With Teradata, organizations can provide agents with full context for impact when it matters. Our solution lets businesses connect and scale on premises, in the cloud, or through a hybrid approach. Teradata delivers real business value with AI.

As a Staff Engineer, you will work on the design and delivery of a core database feature- from technical design to production launch. You will write the spec, build against it, and hold the system accountable to it in production.

• Full technical ownership of a feature in databases: design the data model, define the API surface, implement the core logic, and own it end-to-end through production.
• Lead the most critical, cross-functional technical efforts your component touches — breaking down ambiguous problems and building consensus without waiting for someone else to resolve the ambiguity.
• Function as both a problem solver and a problem finder: identify gaps in the design or the roadmap before they become production incidents.
• Balance long-term system health with the immediate need to ship — making and documenting the local trade-off decisions within the architectural direction the team has set.
• Ensure your components are production-ready: define SLOs, instrument critical paths, write runbooks, and meet customer commitments on durability, availability, and performance.
• Set the technical bar in code review, design review, and on-call. Be the engineer the team looks to when a problem is hard or a decision will be difficult to undo.
• Mentor engineers on Postgres internals, distributed systems design, and the agentic workload patterns that make this problem different from conventional OLTP.

Who you will work with:

Engineers, Product Managers, and other team members who are building data infrastructure for the agentic enterprise. We are looking for AI-native engineers who are energized by the opportunity to build technology that doesn’t exist yet — people who treat AI as a high-trust collaborator in their own work and move with an experimental mindset. Low ego, high craft, bias for shipping.

The Agentic Databases team is building a cloud-native, enterprise-grade operational database purpose-built for AI agents. We are building something more ambitious: an agentic data layer that connects enterprise-governed data, OLTP reliability, and agentic capabilities in a single platform no competitor can replicate.

What you will bring:

• 5+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems, databases, or cloud data infrastructure in production.
• Solid, working knowledge of Postgres: query planning and execution, MVCC, WAL, vacuuming, replication, and the extension model. You have run Postgres under real load and know where it breaks.
• Strong systems programming experience in C or C++; proficiency in at least one higher-level language — Go, Ruby, or Python — for control plane and tooling work. Ruby experience is a strong plus.
• Experience building high-availability, multi-tenant, or highly distributed data systems in cloud environments.
• Comfort navigating large, complex codebases and leading cross-team architecture efforts.
• An AI-native working style: you use AI actively in your own engineering work, prototype faster because of it, and think naturally about how the systems you build will be used by agents rather than humans.
• A track record of driving projects from concept to production with measurable impact.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence across engineering and product without relying on authority.
• Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, or equivalent depth demonstrated through production work.

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