Database & Systems Engineer
Engineers in this role design and operate the database and storage systems that underpin AI infrastructure at massive scale, handling everything from query optimization and transaction management to distributed storage architecture. They work deeply with storage engines, cache layers, and multi-database topologies, making critical tradeoffs between consistency, performance, and resilience as their systems support billions of requests and exabyte-scale workloads. Unlike query optimization or distributed systems specialists, these engineers own the full vertical of how data is stored, retrieved, and scaled—partnering with infrastructure and product teams to ensure databases reliably serve both transactional product workloads and compute-intensive AI training pipelines. They typically sit within platform or infrastructure organizations alongside teams building query engines, replication systems, and cloud infrastructure.
Measured across 29 of 29 open postings.
This role is advertised at 2 levels, so a single figure for the role would describe none of them. Experience and pay are the midpoints for each level on its own.
| Level | Share | Median years | Median pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior | 41%(12) | 5 | — |
| Staff / Principal | 45%(13) | 10 | — |
A dash means too few postings stated it to report a midpoint. Most companies do not publish a salary band, so pay is indicative rather than a market rate. 1 level with fewer than 10 open postings is not shown.
“Proficiency leveraging AI tools to augment software development”
“integrate AI-native capabilities from Voyage AI”
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Database and storage engineering
Distributed systems architecture
Systems performance optimization
Backend and API engineering
Incident response and reliability
Monitoring and observability
Cloud infrastructure operations
Research-to-production translation
Technical program management
Data pipeline engineering
Inference performance optimization
Mentoring and code review
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
29 open Database & Systems Engineer jobs across 12 companies.
Other Engineering roles
General-purpose software engineering roles focused on building and maintaining software systems. Covers generalist SWE positions that don't clearly fall into frontend, backend, fullstack, or other specialized tracks.
Engineers focused on server-side systems, APIs, services, and data processing pipelines. Includes roles explicitly labeled as backend or server-side development.
Engineers specializing in user-facing interfaces, web applications, and client-side development. Includes UI/UX engineering and web development roles.
Engineers working across the entire application stack, handling both frontend and backend responsibilities.
Engineers building and maintaining internal platforms, cloud infrastructure, compute systems, and developer tooling.