Job Description
Software Development Engineer (SDE 3)
About Tessell
Tessell is a Data and AI Platform company. We provide managed data services (PaaS) across clouds - a multi-engine Database-as-a-Service running real production workloads at enterprise scale, chosen for the efficiency and control it gives enterprises over their data estate. The role We’re building the next generation of services and infrastructure building blocks for the AI era. Think instant provisioning, copy-on-write branching, serverless economics - designed for a world where AI agents provision and consume data infrastructure as fluidly as developers do.
You will own end-to-end feature delivery across our distributed storage and distributed computesystems - the parts that hold customer bytes durably across availability zones and turn customer intent into running infrastructure in seconds. You’ll partner with architects and senior engineers across the team, and own the production quality of what you ship.
Responsibilities
● Build and ship - design, implement, test, and operate features end-to-end across the platform.
● Engineer for resilience - make sure what you ship survives crashes, timeouts, retries, and partial failures.
● Own feature design - drive the technical approach; partner with architects and senior engineers on cross-cutting decisions.
● Shape the customer-facing API surface - design contracts customers depend on; own versioning and backward compatibility.
● Partner across teams - write design notes when work crosses service boundaries; review peers’ work.
● Operate what you ship - observability and post-mortems for the systems you own.
Minimum qualifications
● 5+ years building production backend systems in Go or an equivalent language.
● Hands-on experience with distributed systems - sagas, state machines, work queues,
idempotency, retries, exponential backoff.
● Production Postgres experience - RLS, transactions, isolation levels, schema migrations, connection pooling.
● Experience designing gRPC and protobuf service contracts - schemas, deadlines, retries.
● Hands-on production experience on a major public cloud - AWS, GCP, or Azure.
● Demonstrated production ownership - you’ve designed, shipped, and operated features that customers depend on.
Preferred qualifications
● Experience working with a systems language - Rust, C, or C++.
● Experience building managed databases or working on database internals.
● Experience with Kubernetes operators - using existing ones or building custom operators
for stateful workloads (e.g., KubeVirt).
Why you should apply
● If you enjoy hard, foundational problems - distributed-systems durability, replication, and performance under failure that don’t have textbook answers - there’s no shortage of them here.
● Real impact from day one - enterprise customers depend on what you ship today, and the next generation of AI-era data infrastructure runs on what you build tomorrow.
● Work alongside experienced architects and senior engineers across the platform - in a friendly, collaborative team.
● Competitive compensation, equity, and clear technical-leadership pathing in a focused team on its way to becoming a unicorn.
Equal opportunity at Tessell
Tessell is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer. We offer equal employmentn opportunities to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.