About Firebolt

Firebolt is a cloud data warehouse built for the speed, scale, and flexibility required by modern Data & AI applications. By delivering ultra-low latency, high concurrency, and multi-dimensional elasticity, Firebolt enables teams to build data-intensive AI products that perform at scale. Backed by over $270M in funding and led by a world-class engineering team and experienced leadership, Firebolt is redefining AI data infrastructure and helping companies unlock the full potential of their data.

About the team

We are the Firebolt Engines team, responsible for the production experience of our core Engines. We build and manage the orchestration layer that provisions, scales, and operates our bespoke Query Engine, enabling customers to execute queries.

You will be joining as a founding member of our new Self Hosted Engineering team, a specialized group within the broader Engines organization. This team has a critical mission: to adapt and deploy our core Engine technology for customers in complex, self hosted, and air-gapped environments. This role combines the high-impact, cross-functional collaboration of the Engines team with the unique challenge of bringing Firebolt to a new class of enterprise customers.

About the role

We are seeking a founding Technical Lead Manager (TLM) to build and lead our new Self Hosted Engineering team. This is a unique opportunity for a standout senior engineer eager to step into leadership, or a new manager who wants to maintain a strong, hands-on connection to the technology. You will be responsible for hiring and mentoring a team of skilled engineers, defining the technical roadmap for our self hosted offerings, and ensuring the successful delivery and operation of Firebolt in complex, air-gapped environments. You will be the key technical authority, guiding the architecture and implementation while managing the team's day-to-day execution and contributing to implementation yourself.

About the day to day

• Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing engineering team focused on self hosted and air-gapped deployments.
• Partner with Senior Leadership and GTM to define the strategy and technical roadmap for Firebolt's self hosted offerings.
• Lead the design and implementation of the infrastructure, tooling, and processes required to package, deliver, and maintain Firebolt in customer environments.
• Serve as a hands-on technical leader, contributing to the codebase and guiding architectural decisions for on-premise solutions.
• Manage project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables for your team.
• Collaborate with development teams across the company to adapt Firebolt services for self hosted reliability, scalability, and security.
• Establish and own the operational practices for supporting self hosted customers, including acting as a senior escalation point for complex incidents.

• BS degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience in Software Engineering or Site Reliability Engineering, with a focus on infrastructure.
• 6+ months of experience in a technical leadership or management role.
• Deep, production-level experience with Kubernetes and its ecosystem, including deploying and managing applications in complex environments.
• Proven experience as a professional developer of production software, with a willingness to make cross-cutting changes in the Firebolt codebase regardless of language. Development experience in Go or C++ is a strong plus.
• Hands-on experience building and operating distributed systems in on-premise or air-gapped environments.
• Experience building and operating highly concurrent, highly available, and fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• A basic understanding of networking, network protocols and security considerations.

Preferred qualifications

• 2+ years of experience in a technical leadership or management role, with a proven track record of leading successful engineering teams.
• Experience building and leading a team from the ground up.
• Strong Linux fundamentals and an understanding of networking, including a variety of network protocols and security considerations.
• A deep understanding of application and infrastructure security in locked-down environments.
• Experience in monitoring and observability for on-premise systems.
• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines like GitHub Actions
• Experience working with Argo CD, Crossplane, Terraform, FoundationDB, Kafka, and Kubernetes operators

Additional Resources:

Learn about some Engines features in this blog post from our Engineering Director - Artem.

Watch this presentation from our CTO to find out *why* we build Firebolt.

Assembling a Query Engine From Spare Parts (VLDB/CDMS 2022): A technical deep dive into how Firebolt built a modern, cloud-native query engine.

Firebolt Engineering Blog: Ongoing stories from our engineering team covering distributed systems, performance optimization, and SQL engine internals.