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Granica is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build foundational lakehouse systems for AI. You will work on the core infrastructure behind Crunch, Granica's continuous optimization product for enterprise lakehouse data, including systems for metadata management, transaction semantics, table maintenance, object-store-backed storage layouts, file-level optimization, and lakehouse cost/performance across petabyte- and exabyte-scale environments.
You will own core systems that directly affect customer infrastructure cost, query performance, table reliability, and the operational health of large lakehouse environments. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone with deep systems experience working at the intersection of data lakes, table formats, metadata systems, storage layout, query performance, and AI infrastructure.
Key responsibilities include:
- Build metadata and transaction systems for large-scale tabular datasets, supporting time travel, schema evolution, partition evolution, snapshot isolation, and atomic consistency
- Develop table-maintenance infrastructure for lakehouse formats such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Apache Hudi
- Build systems for manifests, snapshots, transaction logs, metadata pruning, snapshot expiration, table garbage collection, and catalog consistency
- Optimize file layout, clustering, compaction, file sizing, data skipping, indexing, and read-path performance
- Improve performance and cost efficiency across object-store-backed lakehouse environments such as S3, GCS, and ADLS
- Work with columnar formats such as Parquet and ORC, including encoding, compression, layout, pruning, and read-path optimization
- Build systems that make lakehouse tables faster, cheaper, and more reliable across engines and platforms such as Spark, Flink, Trino, Presto, Databricks, and Snowflake-adjacent environments
- Debug performance bottlenecks across storage, metadata, table maintenance, query execution, network, and compute layers
- Develop workload-aware table optimization systems that learn from access patterns and reorganize data automatically
- Implement algorithms in compression, representation, layout optimization, and data efficiency
- Contribute to open-source or publish research when appropriate
Granica builds AI infrastructure for enterprises operating massive data environments. The platform helps data and engineering teams reduce storage and compute costs, improve performance and reliability, and prepare large datasets for analytics and AI. Products include Crunch (continuous optimization for enterprise lakehouse data), Myelin (stateful infrastructure for long-running AI agents), and Large Tabular Models (foundation models designed for enterprise tables).
Compensation includes competitive salary, meaningful equity, and performance bonus for top performers. Benefits include 401(k) with company match, comprehensive health coverage, unlimited PTO, daily catered meals in the Mountain View office, and support for research, publication, and conference participation.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong engineering depth in distributed systems, storage systems, databases, or data infrastructure
- Production experience with modern data lake or lakehouse technologies such as Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, Spark, Trino, Presto, Flink, Hive Metastore, Unity Catalog, or similar systems
- Hands-on experience with columnar formats such as Parquet or ORC
- Understanding of metadata-driven architectures, table formats, transaction semantics, query planning, and physical data layout
- Experience with table maintenance, compaction, clustering, file sizing, metadata pruning, snapshot expiration, or garbage collection
- Familiarity with cloud object storage systems such as S3, GCS, or ADLS and the performance tradeoffs of building lakehouse systems on top of them
- Strong programming skills in Java, Scala, Go, Rust, C++, or similar systems-oriented languages
- Curiosity about compression, entropy, information theory, and how data representation affects AI efficiency
- A pragmatic builder's mindset: rigorous, hands-on, and comfortable owning complex systems end to end
BONUS QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience contributing to Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, Spark, Flink, Trino, Presto, Velox, DuckDB, Polars, Parquet, ORC, or related systems
- Experience with manifests, snapshots, metadata catalogs, schema evolution, partition evolution, delete handling, transaction logs, or table garbage collection
- Experience solving the small-file problem, optimizing object-store access patterns, or improving table health at scale
- Background in storage engines, query engines, indexing, caching, encoding, compression, or adaptive query optimization
- Research or open-source contributions in distributed systems, databases, storage, compression, indexing, or data processing
- Interest in how physical data representation affects model training, inference, retrieval, and reasoning efficiency
