Senior Software Engineer, AI Data Systems & Database Infrastructure
Ambient.aiBase Salary
$168k - $205k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate scalable database infrastructure for critical production and AI systems.
- Scale relational, analytical, and vector data stores for product, customer, and AI workloads.
- Improve latency, throughput, availability, reliability, durability, and cost across database systems.
- Own architecture decisions involving partitioning, sharding, replication, indexing, caching, query optimization, and data modeling.
- Operate tier-0 data services with reliability, observability, incident response, and disaster recovery practices.
- Build automation and tooling for provisioning, migrations, monitoring, backups, failover, and capacity planning.
- Partner with AI teams on embeddings, vector search, retrieval workflows, training data, model evaluation, analytics, and low-latency data serving.
- Define best practices for schema design, database usage, data lifecycle management, and operational safety.
- Identify production bottlenecks and improve application, database, cache, and infrastructure layers.
- Help shape the long-term data platform strategy as the company scales.
Requirements
- At least 7 years of industry experience in database infrastructure, backend infrastructure, distributed systems, or production platform engineering.
- Deep hands-on experience operating and scaling production databases in high-availability environments.
- Experience with relational, analytical, vector, and caching data systems, including technologies such as PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, pgvector, and Redis.
- Strong understanding of partitioning, sharding, replication, indexing, caching, query planning, storage engines, latency, availability, reliability, and operational simplicity.
- Experience operating tier-0 or business-critical infrastructure with observability, monitoring, alerting, SLOs, capacity planning, incident response, failover, and disaster recovery.
- Strong programming skills, ideally in Python, C++, or Go.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, Terraform, and infrastructure-as-code practices.
- Ability to collaborate with backend, AI, product, security, and infrastructure teams.
- Preferred experience includes real-time high-volume products, multi-region architectures, zero-downtime migrations, AI or ML workloads, streaming systems, database internals, and internal database platforms.
Benefits
- Regular full-time employees receive stock options.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, EAP, legal services, and 401(k) benefits are provided.
- Flexible time off includes a Winter Break for most roles, depending on customer demand.
- The latest tech and company swag are delivered to employees.
- Engineering teams work from the Redwood City office three days per week, with other Bay Area employees joining on Fridays.
Tech Stack
About Ambient.ai
Ambient.ai is the leader in Agentic Physical Security. At the core of the platform is Ambient Intelligence, powered by Ambient Pulsar, the first always-on, edge-optimized reasoning Vision-Language Model (VLM) purpose-built for physical security. Ambient.ai transforms existing cameras, sensors, and access control systems into a unified intelligence layer that continuously perceives, understands, and acts in real time. By reasoning across video, access, and sensor data, Ambient.ai detects and interprets 150+ threat signatures, validates real risk, and orchestrates the appropriate response. With capabilities spanning Agentic Monitoring, Agentic Investigations, Agentic Access Intelligence, and Agentic Threat Analysis & Response, customers reduce false alarms by over 90%, accelerate investigations from days to minutes, and help resolve more than 80% of alerts in under one minute. Trusted by Fortune 100 enterprises across campuses, data centers, and critical infrastructure, Ambient.ai delivers proactive safety, operational efficiency, and measurable ROI at enterprise scale.