Senior Software Engineer, Vector Indexing

About LanceDB

LanceDB is a developer-friendly, open-source data lake for multimodal AI. From hyper-scalable vector search to advanced retrieval for RAG, from streaming training data to interactive exploration of large-scale AI datasets, LanceDB is the best foundation for your AI application, and powers some of the most groundbreaking applications and challenging requirements today.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Software Engineer focused on Vector Indexing to help build the next generation of vector-native data infrastructure. You’ll work on high-performance indexing and search systems at the core of LanceDB, enabling scalable similarity search, full-text search, and flexible indexing for the open-source and enterprise communities alike.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Designing, building, and maintaining core vector indexing and search components

• Implementing GPU-accelerated indexing algorithms and performance optimizations

• Maintaining and evolving vector index algorithms, including pruning, quantization, and graph-based methods

• Developing and optimizing full-text search capabilities and integrations

• Benchmarking, profiling, and tuning performance across varied workloads

• Writing and maintaining documentation, benchmarks, tutorials, and blog posts to support and grow adoption

• Engaging with the open-source community: reviewing contributions, triaging issues, and joining design discussions

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in Rust

• Experience designing or implementing vector search or indexing algorithms (e.g., HNSW, IVF, PQ, quantization, clustering)

• Proficiency in C for GPU-related development

• Familiarity with GPU acceleration frameworks (CUDA, ROCm, etc.)

• Demonstrated ability to benchmark, profile, and optimize system performance

• Excellent written communication and documentation skills

• Comfortable collaborating in open-source environments

Nice to Have

• Understanding of full-text search systems (Lucene, Elasticsearch, Tantivy, etc.)

• Experience building or maintaining data systems, databases, or search engines

• Familiarity with distributed systems and scale-out architecture

• Background in web APIs, embedding serving, or real-time systems

• Contributions to or maintenance of open-source projects

What We Offer

• A key role shaping an open-source project with real production usage

• Remote-first team with flexible hours

• Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits

• Generous learning budget and support for open-source contributions

About the LanceDB Team

LanceDB was created by experts with decades of experience building tools for data science and machine learning. From co-authors of pandas to Apache PMC members of HDFS, Arrow, and Delta, the LanceDB team has created open-source tools used by millions worldwide.