Staff Database Internals Engineer

Our company

At Teradata, we believe that people thrive when empowered with better information. Teradata Autonomous Knowledge Platform activates enterprise intelligence by unifying data, knowledge and business context to achieve tangible outcomes. With Teradata, organizations can provide agents with full context for impact when it matters. Our solution lets businesses connect and scale on premises, in the cloud, or through a hybrid approach. Teradata delivers real business value with AI.

What You’ll Do

Join a small advanced research team within the Office of the Chief Technology Officer focused on shaping the next generation of Teradata’s platform.

This role centers on the control layer—how systems are orchestrated, coordinated, and exposed. You’ll design and build services that manage lifecycle, define system behavior, and provide the interfaces through which infrastructure is controlled and consumed.

Working in a greenfield environment, you’ll help define how the control plane operates—from provisioning and scaling to secure exposure. These systems are intended to support highly scalable workloads and evolve into customer-facing capabilities.

You’ll be working in areas where scale introduces new constraints, and system behavior under coordination and change is as important as correctness.

You’ll use AI-assisted tools to explore designs, accelerate implementation, and expand the range of what you can build, while ensuring systems remain robust and scalable.

You’ll operate with significant ownership, using AI-assisted tools to explore and implement designs quickly while ensuring coherence and reliability.

• Design and build control plane systems responsible for lifecycle management, orchestration, and coordination of distributed infrastructure
• Define how infrastructure is provisioned, scaled, and managed through APIs and service-based interfaces
• Shape system behavior around scaling, availability, and multi-environment operation
• Design identity and access models, including integration patterns with systems such as OIDC, SAML, or similar frameworks
• Build or extend control mechanisms such as controllers, coordination services, or workflow-driven provisioning systems
• Contribute to runtime-driven provisioning and lifecycle workflows that respond to system demand
• Use AI-assisted tools to accelerate development and explore implementation approaches

Who You’ll Work With

Collaborate with infrastructure engineering to define clear boundaries between system layers

What Makes You a Qualified Candidate

• Experience designing and building distributed systems, platform services, or control layers
• Strong familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures
• Experience designing APIs, service orchestration, and system coordination patterns
• Understanding of identity, access, and security models in distributed systems (e.g., OIDC, SAML, or similar)
• Programming experience in a backend language (e.g., Go, Java, Python, or similar)
• Experience designing systems with scalability, reliability, and strong cost-performance characteristics
• Comfort working in environments where architecture and system boundaries are still being defined

What You’ll Bring

• Background in big data, data pipelines, or analytical platforms - understanding the scale and volume of data the underlying engine processes helps you build the right abstractions.

• Familiarity with query engine or analytical database architectures (DataFusion, Trino, Presto, Spark, or similar). The control plane problems are largely engine-agnostic, but awareness of what sits below is valuable.

• Experience adapting or extending open-source control planes (Kubernetes operators, custom controllers, service mesh configurations) to meet non-standard requirements.

• Experience with eBPF, kernel performance tuning, or NUMA-aware hardware configuration.

What Sets You Apart

• You’ve built systems that other engineers or customers depend on to operate reliably at scale

• You’ve designed coordination or control systems that manage complex infrastructure behavior

• You understand system interactions beyond individual services

• You’re motivated by shaping platforms early where your decisions define long-term behavior

Why We Think You'll Love Teradata

We prioritize a people-first culture because we know our people are at the very heart of our success. We embrace a flexible work model because we trust our people to make decisions about how, when, and where they work. We focus on well-being because we care about our people and their ability to thrive both personally and professionally. We are committed to actively working to foster an inclusive environment that celebrates people for all of who they are.

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