Senior Staff Engineer, Agentic Databases

Teradata is a company that empowers organizations with better information through its Autonomous Knowledge Platform. As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will take full technical ownership of core Agent Services, leading cross-functional efforts and ensuring system readiness for production.

Responsibilities:

• Own the design and delivery of one or more of our core Agent Services — Agent Memory, LLM Cache, Semantic Context Layer — from technical design to production launch
• Write the spec, build against it, and hold the system accountable to it in production
• Full technical ownership of an Agent Service: design the data model, define the API surface, implement the core logic, and own it end-to-end through production
• Lead the most critical, cross-functional technical efforts your component touches — breaking down ambiguous problems and building consensus without waiting for someone else to resolve the ambiguity
• Function as both a problem solver and a problem finder: identify gaps in the design or the roadmap before they become production incidents
• Balance long-term system health with the immediate need to ship — making and documenting the local trade-off decisions within the architectural direction the team has set
• Ensure your components are production-ready: define SLOs, instrument critical paths, write runbooks, and meet customer commitments on durability, availability, and performance
• Set the technical bar in code review, design review, and on-call. Be the engineer the team looks to when a problem is hard or a decision will be difficult to undo
• Mentor engineers on Postgres internals, distributed systems design, and the agentic workload patterns that make this problem different from conventional OLTP

Requirements:

• 10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems, databases, or cloud data infrastructure in production
• Solid, working knowledge of Postgres: query planning and execution, MVCC, WAL, vacuuming, replication, and the extension model. You have run Postgres under real load and know where it breaks
• Strong systems programming experience in C or C++; proficiency in at least one higher-level language — Go, Ruby, or Python — for control plane and tooling work
• Experience building high-availability, multi-tenant, or highly distributed data systems in cloud environments
• Comfort navigating large, complex codebases and leading cross-team architecture efforts
• An AI-native working style: you use AI actively in your own engineering work, prototype faster because of it, and think naturally about how the systems you build will be used by agents rather than humans
• A track record of driving projects from concept to production with measurable impact
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence across engineering and product without relying on authority
• BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent depth demonstrated through production work
• Ruby experience is a strong plus