C++ Engineer

About Arango:

Arango delivers a unified, natively multimodel contextual data platform that powers AI agents, assistants, and applications with the unified, current, and trusted business context needed to reason, decide, and act at scale.

The Arango Contextual Data Platform connects fragmented enterprise data with LLMs, copilots, and AI agents through a simplified architecture delivered out of the box. By combining graph, vector, document, key-value, and search capabilities in a single platform, Arango eliminates the complex stacks many organizations build to operationalize enterprise AI.

Trusted by organizations including NVIDIA, HPE, the London Stock Exchange, PSI CRO, the U.S. Air Force, NIH, Siemens, Transient.AI, Matpriskollen, and Articul8, Arango helps enterprises move from AI pilots to reliable production systems faster while lowering infrastructure complexity and total cost of ownership. Arango is a proud member of the NVIDIA Inception Program and the AWS ISV Accelerate Program. Learn more at arango.ai, LinkedIn, and G2.

Location

Only candidates who live in and are authorized to work in Europe will be considered. While this is a work-from-home role, some travel may be required.

About the Role:

The AQL team at Arango is responsible for the heart of how ArangoDB answers questions: the AQL execution engine and query optimizer that turn multi-model queries across documents, graphs, and search into fast, reliable results for our customers.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer (AQL Query Engine) to develop and evolve our execution engine and optimizer, bring relevant ideas from database research into production, and drive projects from planning through delivery while owning the tests, performance, and regression coverage for the work you ship.

This role is ideal for someone who is deeply curious about query processing and database internals, enjoys reading research papers and turning promising ideas into real-world improvements, and takes ownership end to end, from investigating a tricky customer issue on their own to shaping technical direction in planning and product discussions.

You will collaborate with fellow engineers on the AQL team and across other teams such as storage, search, cluster, and product, and you will mentor and support junior developers as they grow their skills and confidence.

This is a great opportunity to have a direct, visible impact on the performance and capabilities of a widely used multi-model database, work on hard and interesting problems at the intersection of research and engineering, and help shape both the product and the team as it grows.

What You’ll Do:

• Design, implement, and evolve the AQL execution engine and query optimizer, improving the performance, scalability, and capabilities of query processing across documents, graphs, and search.
• Search for, evaluate, and apply relevant database research, turning promising ideas from academic papers into production-ready features and optimizations.
• Own the quality of your work end to end, including unit, integration, performance, and regression tests for everything you deliver.
• Drive projects from planning and design through implementation and delivery, working closely with your team and coordinating with other engineering teams.
• Independently investigate and resolve bugs and customer issues, from root-cause analysis to a tested fix.
• Take part in technical discussions, sprint and roadmap planning, and product decisions, bringing an engineering perspective to what we build and why.
• Mentor and support junior developers through code reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing.

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, ideally including significant work on database systems, query engines, compilers, or other performance-critical infrastructure.
• A track record of independently delivering complex technical projects from design to production.

• Experience with distributed databases, distributed query execution, or cluster-aware query planning.
• Familiarity with graph databases and graph traversal algorithms, or with full-text and vector search.
• Experience with query languages beyond SQL, such as Cypher, Gremlin, or ArangoDB’s AQL itself.
• A background in database research, such as a Master’s or PhD focused on query processing, or published work in the field.
• Experience with Linux systems programming, tools like perf, Valgrind, or sanitizers, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience working directly with customers on technical issues.

At Arango, we believe that AI is only as powerful as the data foundation. Our mission is to help organizations build AI systems that can reason, decide and act based on unified, current, and trusted business context at scale. We are helping define a new category of infrastructure: the contextual data layer for AI.

Working at Arango means:

• Contributing to cutting-edge AI and data infrastructure
• Collaborating with experienced engineers, marketers, and product leaders
• Helping shape how enterprises build AI-powered applications

If you're excited about the intersection of AI, data, and social media, we’d love to hear from you.