Senior Software Engineer, AI Data Systems & Database Infrastructure

Senior Software Engineer, AI Data Systems & Database Infrastructure LocationRedwood City Employment TypeFull timeLocation TypeHybridDepartmentEngineeringCompensation$168K – $205K • Offers EquityAt Ambient.ai, we take a market-based approach to compensation. Final offers are based on job-related skills, experience, location, and internal equity.Base salary is just one part of our total rewards package, including stock options and the opportunity to share in the company’s growth.Build a safer world with us, one incident at a time.Ambient.ai is the category creator and leader in Agentic Physical Security. Powered by Ambient Pulsar, the first reasoning Vision-Language Model purpose-built for physical security, our platform seamlessly integrates with existing security cameras and physical access control systems to unify monitoring, access control, threat assessment, response, and investigations through an always-on reasoning layer that augments security operators with superhuman capabilities. The results: 95% fewer false alarms, investigations 20x faster, and 10x faster response.The momentum speaks for itself: we doubled new ARR in FY26, we process 200M+ video hours per day, and have delivered results for world-class customers including Cisco, ServiceNow, SentinelOne, TikTok, Bayer, and MoMA. That kind of momentum creates an environment where great people thrive, and it shows: we recently ranked #71 out of 500 on the Forbes best startup employers list.Founded in 2017 and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and Allegion Ventures, Ambient.ai is on a fast-paced journey to fulfill our mission: prevent every security incident possible.Ready to learn more? Connect with us on LinkedIn and YouTubeAbout the role:We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to design, build, and scale the database platform that powers our most critical production and AI systems.We are looking for an engineer who deeply understands databases and distributed systems, and who can build the platforms, abstractions, and scaling patterns required to operate data stores reliably at high scale.In this role, you will work at the intersection of databases, distributed systems, application architecture, and AI infrastructure. You will help scale relational, analytical, and vector data stores across both the database layer and the application layer. This includes designing systems for partitioning, sharding, routing, caching, replication, query optimization, and high-availability operations.You will also work closely with AI teams to build the data infrastructure that supports modern AI applications, including vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, embedding stores, model evaluation datasets, analytical workloads, and low-latency data access for AI-powered product experiences.The ideal candidate has built or operated database platforms at scale and understands the tradeoffs behind systems like Vitess, CockroachDB, Spanner, DynamoDB, Cassandra, Redis, ClickHouse, and modern vector search systems. You should be comfortable reasoning about latency, availability, durability, consistency, reliability, and operational complexity in tier-0 production environments.This role is ideal for someone who wants to apply deep database and distributed systems expertise to the next generation of AI-powered products.What you'll do:Design, build, and operate scalable database infrastructure for mission-critical production and AI systems.Scale relational, analytical, and vector data stores to support growing product, customer, and AI workloads.Improve database performance across latency, throughput, availability, reliability, durability, and cost.Own database architecture decisions around partitioning, sharding, replication, indexing, caching, query optimization, and data modeling.Operate tier-0 data services with strong reliability, observability, incident response, and disaster recovery practices.Build automation and tooling to improve database provisioning, migrations,...