Principal Software Engineer - Optimizer

Sorry, this job was removed at 12:22 p.m. (CST) on Monday, Mar 23, 2026
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Hiring Remotely in United States
Remote
Big Data • Software
The most advanced open-source distributed SQL database for modern, high-demand applications.
The Role

Join us as we scale our business by building on our tremendous success around the world. The massive database market is going to double over the next few years and TiDB is a global player positioned as a major disruptor with TiDB Database and Database as a Service offering. TiDB is an open-source, cloud-native, distributed SQL database for elastic scale and real-time analytics. Large and high-growth organizations in markets as varied as financial services, logistics, gaming, e-commerce and software as a service have successfully deployed and expanded their TiDB footprint on mission-critical applications. Our strong open-source community roots (39,500+ stars on GitHub), innovative products and inclusive culture draw passionate and dedicated people to our company. Learn more about TiDB careers and join our team to be at the forefront of innovation and growth.

 
Role Overview
As a Principal Engineer on the TiDB Optimizer team, you will be a key technical leader responsible for the architectural vision and execution of our query optimization engine. Your work will directly impact the performance, reliability, and predictability of one of the most critical components of the TiDB database. You will tackle deep and complex challenges in query planning, cost-based optimization, and adaptive processing to ensure TiDB remains a world-class distributed SQL database for our global users. This is a high-impact role that offers the opportunity to shape the future of data infrastructure for thousands of companies.
 
Responsibilities 
  • 10+ years of experience in software development with a proven track record of designing, building, and shipping complex database systems or data-intensive distributed systems.
  • Extensive hands-on experience in the design and development of a database query optimizer (e.g., cost-based optimization, query rewrites, join ordering, cardinality estimation, statistics collection).
  • Strong expertise in concurrency, multithreading, and synchronization primitives.
  • Fluency in one or more of the following: C, C++, Go, Rust, or Java.
  • Experience developing in Unix/Linux environments.
 
Qualifications
  • Familiarity with existing query optimizer frameworks like Apache Calcite or GPORCA.
  • Practical experience with other database or data processing technologies such as Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Flink, or Spark.
  • Tackle some of the most challenging problems in distributed databases and query optimization.
  • Your work will be critical to the performance of thousands of TiDB clusters worldwide.
  • Join a world-class team of database kernel engineers and be a recognized technical leader.
  • Contribute to a leading open-source project with a vibrant and active community.

We encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply. Come advance with us! In keeping with our values, no employee or applicant will face discrimination/harassment based on: race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, age, gender, marital domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status, or veteran status. TiDB also strives to prevent other, subtler forms of inappropriate behavior (e.g., stereotyping) from ever gaining a foothold in our organization. Whether blatant or hidden, barriers to success have no place at TiDB.

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The Company
HQ: Sunnyvale, CA
482 Employees
Year Founded: 2015

What We Do

Founded in 2015, TiDB was born from the vision of three talented software engineers who set out to build a database system that would be more scalable and reliable than MySQL, while retaining its rich ecosystem of tools and frameworks. They also wanted a true open-source solution, ensuring flexibility and compatibility. What they didn’t know then was how TiDB would grow to become one of the world’s most popular distributed SQL databases. With over 39,000 GitHub stars, TiDB is the leading open-source distributed SQL database, designed to power data-intensive applications with relentless elasticity, versatility, and reliability. Today, TiDB is trusted by world-renowned organizations such as Databricks, Plaid, Pinterest, and Atlassian to handle their most critical workloads, allowing developers to innovate faster and focus on building features rather than managing infrastructure. Powered by PingCAP, TiDB continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible in data management. With support from leading firms like Sequoia Capital, GGV Capital, Access Technology Ventures, and Coatue Management, TiDB is on a mission to empower developers worldwide to distribute their data with speed, agility, and scale.

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