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Antithesis is reinventing software reliability by running entire software systems inside deterministic simulations to identify bugs with perfect reproductions. The company is addressing the critical verification bottleneck created by AI-generated code, which can produce output faster than humans but often with quality issues.
You'll join a small, deeply technical team building Pangolin, Antithesis's custom streaming analytics database. Pangolin is the backbone of how customers interact with and make sense of their data. It's built around a native tree structure that scales to over a billion nodes, supports ACID transactions, and allows customers to define complex queries through JavaScript UDFs. The architecture is modern and disaggregated: storage and compute separation, Lambda-based processing, and S3-backed storage—built from scratch rather than inherited. The system ingests and queries terabytes of customer data daily at high speed.
The team is working on genuinely unsolved problems: on-disk storage formats, query optimization, cross-table joins, and increasingly interactive data experiences. Pangolin is directly integrated into the product—the notebook/UI team builds on top of it, and customers feel every improvement. This creates a tight feedback loop and ensures your work has immediate, visible impact.
In this role, you'll build and evolve Pangolin, work closely with internal customers (especially the notebook/UI team) to define priorities and shape the roadmap, collaborate with the Infrastructure team on deployment and reliability, and contribute to long-term technical direction through design docs and architectural thinking.
You should have strong proficiency in Rust with a focus on safe, performant, idiomatic code. Deep systems programming fundamentals are essential—you reason about memory, concurrency, and performance from first principles. You have strong CS fundamentals in data structures and algorithms and a track record of solving hard problems from the ground up. Backend engineering experience is required, ideally with direct exposure to or deep understanding of database systems. You're product-minded: comfortable talking to internal customers, translating fuzzy requirements into concrete priorities, and owning delivery end-to-end.
Bonus qualifications include experience building, operating, or maintaining large-scale distributed backend systems; deep performance optimization; Linux internals; V8; and AWS (S3 & Lambda). The team values high engineering quality and works in-person (5 days/week) in Vienna, VA or San Francisco, CA to build trust and tackle hard problems together.
