Founding Engineer - Data Infrastructure, Snowflake, Trino, DuckDB

Position Overview

The job title is Founding Engineer - Data Infrastructure, Snowflake, Trino, DuckDB. An early-stage startup is seeking a Founding Engineer to design and build the core technology powering a next-generation data platform. You’ll work directly with the founding team to shape the architecture, choose the right tools, and take ownership of mission-critical technical milestones.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and refine core logic for routing queries to multiple engines (e.g., Snowflake, DuckDB, Trino, ClickHouse) based on cost, performance, and freshness
• Develop systems to expose and serialize query engine plans for consistent use across multiple environments
• Build automated benchmarking suites to compare latency, throughput, and cost across engines on real-world workloads
• Create and maintain APIs for simulating and testing query engine behavior
• Contribute to a storage layer optimized for Iceberg tables, enabling high-performance ad-hoc analytics
• Build frameworks to ensure data integrity across distributed query engines
• Scale infrastructure to handle demanding distributed systems workloads

Required Qualifications

• Experience in data engineering, warehousing, distributed systems, and infrastructure development
• Familiarity with cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, Dremio, ClickHouse, etc.
• Understanding of Lakehouse architectures such as Iceberg, Hudi, and Delta Lake
• Skills in ETL, data modeling, database optimization, and query engine performance tuning
• Strong programming background in Python, Rust, or Java
• Experience in early-stage startups and building from the ground up