🚀 QuestDB (YC S20) is Seeking a Sales Engineer

🌐 About QuestDB

QuestDB is a high-performance, low-latency time-series database built on open formats, designed to empower developers to solve complex data problems.

The platform is engineered to handle massive scale, where the ingestion rate $R$ can be expressed as: $R > 1,000,000 \text{ events/second}$

It provides a unified SQL engine that bridges the gap between messaging, stream processing, and tiered storage. This allows organizations to perform millisecond-level computations on live data while maintaining years of queryable history.

🛠 The Technical Foundation

The engine is a masterpiece of low-level engineering, utilizing zero-GC Java, Rust, C++, and assembly.

Feature	Implementation Detail
Storage	Columnar layout for efficiency
Execution	Vectorized and JIT-compiled SQL
Views	Streaming materialized views
Lakehouse	Open tier utilizing `Parquet` and `Iceberg`

QuestDB Enterprise elevates this by transforming a single-server setup into a fully distributed, multi-tiered lakehouse architecture, making it suitable for mission-critical paths.

📈 Market Traction & Recognition

Community: Over 17k GitHub stars; currently the fastest-growing DB in its category.
Footprint: Deployed across four continents in tier-1 banks, hedge funds, crypto platforms, exchanges, and energy firms.
Expansion: Moving aggressively into Physical AI, aerospace, and robotics.
Accolades: Recently named the Best Trading Analytics Platform at the TradingTech Summit Europe—notably the first ~~legacy vendor~~ non-legacy vendor to win.

🤝 Working at QuestDB

We are looking for passionate individuals dedicated to building the infrastructure of tomorrow.

Elite Talent: Collaborate with world-class engineers (including two top-10 finishers of the One Billion Row Challenge).
Culture: We prioritize autonomy, ownership, and independent thought.
Leadership: Our management is transparent and actively seeks strategic input from all employees.
Challenge: We tackle the most grueling problems at the deepest layers of data infrastructure.

🎯 The Role: Pre-Sales Engineer (North America)

We need a technical leader to spearhead the sales cycle in North America. You will be the primary technical authority, ensuring that every deal is validated and credible before the contract is signed.

The Technical Sales Lifecycle

Whether you are explaining replication and failover to a bank's platform team or helping an aerospace firm stream rocket telemetry in real-time, you are the "engineer in the room." Since many clients are replacing incumbent systems, your goal is to prove the architecture and numbers are superior and executable.

Collaboration Matrix:

CEO: Close coordination for NYC-based operations.
Sales Team: Partnering on every regional deal.
CTO & Core Engineering: Direct feedback loop to influence the product roadmap.

📋 Responsibilities

Technical Discovery: Interview architects and quants to determine data volume, velocity, and current infrastructure.
PoC Management: Define written success criteria and timelines; build ingestion paths, design schemas, and measure query performance.
Architecture Ownership: Lead discussions on:
- Sizing and High Availability (HA).
- Backup/Recovery and RBAC.
- BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) on AWS/Azure.
- Kubernetes, TLS, SSO, and Parquet tiering.
Technical Evangelism: Deliver deep-dives tailored to the audience, from small quant teams to corporate review boards.
Competitive Intelligence: Precisely position QuestDB against other time-series databases (knowing exactly where we win and where we don't).
Due Diligence: Handle RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires.
Seamless Handoff: Ensure support and engineering have a full blueprint of the closed deal (configurations, promises, and open items).
Asset Creation: Develop reusable migration guides, benchmark reports, and sample pipelines.
Field Intelligence: Provide evidence-based product gap analysis to the CTO.
Representation: Attend industry events in New York, Chicago, and Toronto.

✅ Requirements

Must-Haves

Proven track record of running technical evaluations for enterprise buyers.
Experience in a hands-on role (Pre-Sales, Solutions, Data, or Software Engineering) focusing on databases or streaming infra.
Located in New York City or the US East Coast (with ability to travel to NYC frequently).
Expert-level SQL and deep knowledge of database internals (e.g., partitioning, indexing, and why vectorized execution is critical for time series).
Precise communication skills: the ability to explain trade-offs to skeptics and the integrity to say "I will check" rather than guessing.
Confidence in leading technical sessions independently.

Nice-to-Haves

Experience with columnar analytical databases.
Capital Markets Expertise: Familiarity with tick data, order books, or risk systems.
Proficiency with Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS/Azure.
Ability to write production code in Python and one of: Java, C++, Rust, or Go.

Knowledge of the Python data ecosystem:

import pandas as pd
import polars as pl
import pyarrow as pa
# Experience with Parquet and Grafana

🎁 What We Offer

Equity: A generous options package.
Flexibility: Flexible working hours.
Gear: Complete freedom to choose your technical equipment.
Environment: A team of highly qualified, ambitious peers.