Staff Software Engineer - Very Large Databases

About Us:

Lovelace AI was born from the desire to apply state of the art AI and systems engineering to the question of human safety, especially in dangerous conditions such as conflict, disaster response, anti-terrorism and deterrence against AIs designed by adversaries to harm civilians.

How many lives can be saved by taming the information overload, confusion and conflicting priorities experienced by the people responsible for dealing with dangerous situations around the world? We believe the answer is potentially dramatic, and we are determined to create a team with the wisdom, skills, brainpower, thoughtfulness and experience to make this vision real.

Job Summary:
Lovelace AI is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Software Engineer with deep expertise in distributed databases to join our innovative team. In this role, you will be instrumental in designing, developing, and optimizing our distributed database systems to support Lovelace AI's cutting-edge applications and services. You will work on complex data challenges, ensuring scalability, reliability, and high performance.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the design, development, and implementation of highly scalable and reliable distributed database systems.
• Architect and optimize database schemas, queries, and indexing strategies for performance and efficiency.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including AI researchers, data scientists, and other engineering teams, to understand data requirements and translate them into robust database solutions.
• Evaluate, select, and integrate various distributed database technologies (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB, CockroachDB, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL with sharding).
• Develop and maintain data migration strategies, backup and recovery procedures, and disaster recovery plans.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and logging solutions for database performance and health.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex database-related issues in production environments.
• Drive best practices for database design, development, and operations, including automation and infrastructure as code.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest advancements in distributed database technologies and trends.
• Experience in coding at an expert level in at least one of the high performance languages such as Rust, C++, Go or Java.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering with a significant focus on distributed databases.
• Proven expertise in designing, implementing, and managing large-scale distributed database systems.
• Strong practical experience with at least one or more distributed database technologies (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB, CockroachDB, DynamoDB, distributed PostgreSQL).
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Java, Python, Go, or C++.
• Solid understanding of database internals, concurrency control, distributed transactions, and data consistency models (e.g., eventual consistency, strong consistency).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their database services.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Experience with performance tuning, query optimization, and capacity planning for distributed databases.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to debug complex issues in distributed systems.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, agile environment.
• Experience with big data technologies (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka) is a plus.

Benefits:

LovelaceAI offers competitive compensation packages, comprehensive benefits. We provide a supportive and inclusive work environment where your skills and expertise can make a significant impact on the safety and security of our communities.

Lovelace’s founding team includes:

Andrew Moore, who has a track record of building impactful AI systems, designing them with human rights impact assessments as a top priority, leading the AI division of one of the world’s foremost cloud companies, and actively participating in machine learning and AI research over the past two decades.

Brendan Dunne, a career Special Operations veteran and retired Army officer who has led high performing cross functional teams the past 20 years in the country’s premier national mission force.  He was most recently in charge of US Special Operations Command’s Global Analytics Platform (aka the GAP), one of DoD’s leading technology platforms.

Toby Smith, well known in the Pittsburgh Tech community for his engineering leadership and design skills, and who has led many of the most ambitious and complex system infrastructure projects in Google Pittsburgh and NetApp.  

Here is a note from Andrew Moore to people who are reading these Job Postings:

“Hi folks, I’m so glad you are potentially interested in Lovelace AI. This area means a lot to me because while I am an AI optimist, I also think that we technologists owe it to a rightly skeptical world to show that modern intelligent systems can actually be useful. Usefulness comes in many guises: from life sciences to education and from transportation to entertainment and many others. For many of us, security and public safety is also very high on that list. That reasoning leads to this conclusion: I’m determined to make sure that the people building Lovelace AI gain a lot from the experience, including the chance to solve fascinating problems in computer science, AI, business development, customer success and product management. I also hope that we all learn from each other in a highly enriching work environment. But my main hope is that we have a shared sense of accomplishment as we see an increasing number of national security and public safety domains made safer through sensible and robust use of advanced computer science."