# Software Engineering Manager, Database

**Company:** [LangChain](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/langchain)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $215k – $260k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Rust, Kubernetes, S3, Gcs, Azure Blob, Parquet, Arrow, Olap, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, Prometheus, Tokio
**Posted:** 2026-06-30

> Hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a small systems team building SmithDB, LangChain's purpose-built storage and query layer for AI observability at massive scale. Write production Rust, drive architecture and performance, manage the team, and own the technical roadmap.

## Job Description

## What you'll do
- Write and review production Rust code across ingestion, query execution, and storage layers
- Lead architectural decisions on storage format, compaction, indexing, and query planning
- Drive performance investigations using memory and CPU profiling tools; own the path from profiling to shipped fix
- Design and harden the distributed deployment of SmithDB services on Kubernetes (multi-tenant, high-throughput, low-latency)
- Contribute to cloud object store integrations (S3, GCS, Azure Blob) and set the standard for how SmithDB manages data at rest and in flight
- Build and maintain observability for the engine itself: metrics, tracing, debug tooling
- Manage a small but growing team of systems engineers: set goals, run 1:1s, provide technical mentorship, and grow careers
- Own the SmithDB technical roadmap in partnership with LangSmith product and engineering leadership
- Communicate progress, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to the broader organization: you write concise, decision-ready updates

## What you'll bring
- 7+ years in systems or database engineering, with at least 2 years in a technical lead or engineering management role
- Production Rust experience — you can write it, review it, and have opinions on how to structure it at scale
- Deep understanding of database or storage engine internals: query execution, storage layouts, indexing, compaction
- Proficiency in systems performance analysis: memory allocators, CPU hotspots, lock contention, async runtimes (Tokio)
- Experience deploying and operating distributed services on Kubernetes in a production, multi-tenant environment
- Familiarity with cloud object storage (S3-compatible APIs, consistency models, cost/performance tradeoffs)
- Proven track record of managing engineers — you can recruit, retain, and level-up a team without losing your technical edge

## Nice-to-have
- Experience building or contributing to columnar storage formats (Parquet, Arrow), OLAP query engines, or time-series stores
- Background in observability infrastructure or tracing pipelines (OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, Prometheus)
- Experience scaling a system from early-stage to hundreds of billions / trillions of records

## Compensation
Salary Range: $215,000-$260,000 USD
Compensation includes base salary, variable compensation for relevant roles, meaningful equity, benefits, and perks. Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, flexible vacation, a 401(k) plan, meals on in-office days in the US and more.

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