Founding Engineer

About HydraDB

AI is stateless — HydraDB fixes that with graphs. We build the graph-native context and memory infrastructure that gives AI agents persistent context: a GraphDB built on object storage with semantic search, git-style temporal versioning, and entity resolution. We've raised $6.5M from investors including Jeff Dean, Sky9 Capital, and researchers from OpenAI and DeepMind.

About the team

HydraDB's engineering team is a small, high-conviction group building the graphDB infrastructure layer for modern AI. We own the hardest parts of the stack: query execution, graph storage internals, and distributed systems that real agents depend on in production. The team moves fast, debates hard, and ships core infrastructure that customers depend on. Every engineer here has direct influence on the architecture, the roadmap, and the culture.

About the role

We are hiring 2–3 founding engineers to work on the core. This is not a feature factory role. You will own significant pieces of the platform — query engine, storage layer, graph internals — and make architecture decisions that will shape the product for the next decade. You will work directly with the CEO and founding team, and your name will be on the design docs and the pull requests in the same week.

In this role, you will

• Own and ship core infrastructure: query execution, graph storage layer, and distributed systems
• Make architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team
• Contribute to HydraDB's benchmark and research work — the technical results that define the category
• Participate in architecture reviews and make hard technical trade-offs with real consequences
• Help raise the technical ceiling as the team grows

Your background looks something like this

• Strong CS fundamentals: the kind where you reason from first principles, not just frameworks
• Proficiency in Rust or Go, or the hunger to go deep
• 3+ years of relevant engineering experience
• Comfort owning large, ambiguous problems without a playbook
• Track record of shipping production systems that real customers depend on under load

Even better if you have

• Experience building or scaling distributed systems, databases, or storage infrastructure
• Open source contributions in systems-level projects
• IIT or Recurse Center background
• Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure role

Benefits

• Direct collaboration with the CEO and advisors including Jeff Dean
• Competitive comp + meaningful equity: we want builders to own a real piece of what they create
• Wellness programs, free daily meals in the office, and top-tier gear + software
• Flexible PTO: optimize for deep work, not busywork
• Learning budget: books, courses, conferences, and compute for experiments
• Team offsites: periodic time together to plan, build, and reset

One last thing

The team cares a lot about how people think, not just what they've built. Be ready to answer: what is something you believe in that most people in tech would disagree with you on?