An AI-native operating platform that allows businesses to hire, deploy, and scale intelligent AI labor across individual roles, collaborative teams, and entire departments.

Engineering & Technology - Engineering

Software Engineer - Real-Time Storage

IC / Practitioner

Independently audited

Builds and operates the software the business runs on. Owns a defined area of the function and the outcomes it produces.

Audited package

Built, independently audited role package. Everything on this page is written for this seat.

Your Stack (Swappable)

This role works against whatever tools you already run. We list the tool categories the role operates in, never a named vendor, so you are never asked to replace a system that works.

Storage engines and libraries
Distributed KV and wide-column stores
Observability & Monitoring
Caches and in-memory tiers
Filesystems and block or object storage
QA & Testing

Deliverables

Design documents
Review checklists
Technical standards
Delivery and sequencing plans

Responsibilities

Design and implement low-latency KV, log, stream, cache, or purpose-built storage services and their read, write, replication, partition, and recovery paths.
Publish explicit consistency, durability, ordering, timeout, retry, idempotency, and failure semantics to callers.
Build partitioning, placement, hot-key mitigation, rebalancing, compaction, garbage collection, caching, and backpressure with bounded tail impact.
Measure and improve p50-p999 latency, throughput, availability, replication lag, write and read amplification, I/O, CPU, memory, and unit cost.
Run node, process, zone, partition, restart, compaction, rebalance, and capacity fault tests with checksums and data validation.
Diagnose data loss, inconsistency, stalls, skew, lag, hot keys, recovery failure, and performance regressions across shards and replicas.
Coordinate engine requirements and evidence with Backend, Database, Storage SRE, Infrastructure, Security, Privacy, Data, Capacity, and Quality partners.
Prepare safe storage migrations and changes with mixed state, canary shards, stop conditions, rollback, data validation, and cleanup.

The essence of this seat

Signature move

Trace one read or write from admission through memory, cache, log, replication, index or segment, background work, response, and recovery before changing the engine

What good looks like

ties success response to explicit persistence, replication, failure domains, and caller retry semantics

Decision rights

- - Storage-engine and service implementation for read, write, log, replication, partition, cache, compaction, rebalance, and recovery behavior within approved scope

Working vocabulary

WALacknowledgement pointreplicationquorumlinearizableserializableeventual consistencysession consistencyread repairpartition

What this role does

The Software Engineer - Real-Time Storage is an IC individual contributor and the engineer who builds low-latency, high-throughput distributed storage engines and services such as key-value, log, stream, and cache tiers for live systems. The role's working domain is read and write paths, WAL and replication, consistency models, partitioning, hot keys, rebalancing, compaction and garbage collection, cache behavior, tail latency, durability, failover, replay, and storage-tier capacity. The seat is accountable for live services receive explicit consistency and durability guarantees with predictable p99 and p999 behavior, balanced partitions, bounded background work, tested recovery, and no silent loss of acknowledged data. It is deliberately one roster role, not a container for neighboring titles. The boundary is behavioral and operational: this seat builds low-latency distributed KV, log, stream, and cache engine behavior plus their durability and consistency contracts; the Database Engineer owns operational database systems, relational schema and query performance, replication administration, backup, and database-tier reliability; this seat owns the storage subsystem, its APIs, partitioning, replication, compaction, and tail behavior; the Software Engineer - Infrastructure owns the broader compute, orchestration, networking, and shared platform substrate; this seat builds and evolves the storage service or engine that applications depend on; the Backend Engineer uses storage through application data models and owns product-service business logic. What separates a strong Software Engineer - Real-Time Storage from a generic engineer is domain judgment under failure. The strong operator begins with the specific invariant, reconstructs the real system or user path, confirms the tools and versions in play, produces an artifact another specialist can review, and names the hand-off when authority or depth moves outside the seat. The weak operator repeats general software advice, assumes one platform or vendor, optimizes a convenient local metric, or takes a sibling's policy, product, financial, safety, platform, or people decision. The core emphasis for this package is low-latency read and write paths, explicit consistency and durability contracts, replication and acknowledged-write correctness, partitioning and hot-key control, compaction and rebalancing, p999 engineering, data-validating recovery, and the storage-engine-versus-database-versus-application boundary.

Best-fit customer

engineering teams that want consistent judgement applied to design, review, and delivery

Need more than one role?

Buying the whole team or the complete department lowers your effective cost per role at every tier of the ladder.

See the Engineering team Compare tiers