Principal Rust Software Engineer

Building data and AI-driven software is still way too hard, even for advanced developers. At Spice AI, we’re helping developers combine code with data and machine learning (ML) to create truly intelligent, decision-making applications. Spice AI is on a mission to make this as easy as creating a modern web page.
Spice AI is the creator and primary maintainer of Spice.ai OSS; a unified SQL query interface and portable runtime to locally materialize, accelerate, and query data sourced from any database, data warehouse, or data lake. Spice OSS enables developers to build both data and AI-driven applications by co-locating data and ML models with applications. Read more about the vision to enable the development of intelligent AI-driven applications.
Spice AI is also building the Spice.ai Cloud Platform; building blocks for data and AI-driven applications, including managed, cloud-scale Spice.ai OSS. The Cloud Platform enables developers to compose high-performance SQL query, machine learning training and inferencing, in a single, interconnected AI backend-as-a-service.
Spice AI hires for MEI: Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence.

Who we are looking for

• You are one of the smartest people you know.
• You are passionate about building amazing developer experiences. You start with a customer-obsessed product experience, and then figure out how to enable that with technology.
• You think differently. You do not accept the status-quo. You challenge the current model of the world and take leaps of faith to build it better for everyone.
• You are positive. Instead of focusing on limitations, you ask what’s possible. 
• You care about meaningful work and changing the world. Your work is more than a job. 
• You are comfortable with ambiguity and unknowns, and in these situations, you lead by creating clarity. 
• You are passionate about high performance and have high standards.

What we're looking for

• 2+ years professional Rust experience or 5+ yrs professional C/C++ experience
• Experience in designing, implementing, scaling and shipping production distributed and data systems.
• Experience with Apache infra, CNCF-stack, or cloud-native development, and ideally with Rust/Golang.
• A track record of good design, architectural, engineering and product decisions.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Ability to ramp up quickly and hit the ground running.
• Ideally, experience contributing to open-source projects.

Your responsibilities

• A leader and outstanding contributor in the Spice.ai open-source project.
• Creating, designing, and building the distributed and data systems architecture of the Spice.ai Cloud Platform, our cloud systems, and spicerack.org.
• Take ownership and drive initiatives for improving the product.

Your first 90-days

• Your first month - ramp up and contribute improvements to the Spice.ai project
• 30-60 days - take technical and engineering ownership of an entire feature area
• 60-90 days - propose and execute on aligned technical strategy going forward

About Spice AI
Founded in June 2021 by Microsoft and GitHub alumni Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc, Spice AI creates technology to help developers build intelligent apps that learn and adapt.
Before co-founding Spice AI, Luke was the co-creator of Azure Incubations in the Office of the Azure CTO, where he led cross-functional engineering teams to create and develop technologies like Dapr and OAM.
Spice AI is backed by some of the top industry angel investors and leaders, including Nat Friedman, Chairman of GitHub, Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, and Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub.
Spice AI also has notable VC backing from Madrona Venture Group, Basis Set Ventures, Founders' Co-op, and Picus Capital.
Learn more:
- On TechCrunch and GeekWire- About the team at spice.ai/careers- The Spice.ai general availability announcement blog post- The Spice.ai OSS project announcement blog post