{"id":3317042,"url":"https://alion.io/job/ahrefs-database-engineer","title":"Database Engineer","company":{"id":34332,"name":"Ahrefs","domain":"ahrefs.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/seo-blog-by-ahrefs","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":12,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-28T05:59:10Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":null,"employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Cambridge, United States","Palo Alto, United States","Singapore","Tokyo, Japan"],"countries":["US","SG","JP"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"TiDB","optional":false},{"name":"Configuration Management","optional":true},{"name":"OCaml","optional":true},{"name":"Puppet","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-27T03:52:48Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-27","last_verified_at":"2026-10-28T22:23:05Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"Own the data layer behind one of the biggest crawlers on the web.\nAhrefs helps marketers get their brands found in search, in AI answers and on social. Under the product sits one of the largest datasets on the web, and someone has to keep it fast, correct and alive. \nThe team\nThe Database team owns our databases and storage end to end, from the source code to production. We run ClickHouse, MooseFS, SeaweedFS, TiDB and Elasticsearch on about 1,200 servers holding hundreds of petabytes, in data centres in Singapore, the US and the UK.\nWe don’t file tickets with vendors and wait. When a system doesn’t do what we need, we change its source, prove the change on production data and roll it out ourselves.\nThe job\nYou’ll build and run our data layer: ClickHouse, the MooseFS and SeaweedFS storage under it, and the TiDB and Elasticsearch clusters beside it. You write the code, you ship it, and you’re there when it meets production. You’ll work with AI coding agents as a normal part of the job.\nExamples of what you’ll work on\nBuild storage and query features in ClickHouse, such as replication over a shared file system, and storage policies that place data by its merge history.\nKeep up with upstream ClickHouse LTS releases, keep CI green and ship our own releases regularly.\nMake MooseFS and SeaweedFS highly available and durable: Raft-based metadata servers, follower reads, an intent log, automatic re-replication.\nFind performance problems in production profiles and fix them in the code, from query plans to FUSE clients.\nTrace data corruption to its root cause, even when it’s in compression, the memory allocator or the compiler, and repair the damaged data.\nRoll out releases and storage migrations across about 1,200 servers in three regions, without downtime.\nRun and tune TiDB, TiKV, TiCDC and Elasticsearch: scheduling, replication lag, backups, disk balance.\nCheck risky designs with TLA+ and fault injection, and automate whatever repeats with watchdogs, balancers and dashboards.\nBuild an SRE agent that watches our database clusters, diagnoses incidents and proposes fixes.\nYou’re probably right for this if\nYou write strong C++, C and Rust, can work in Go, and feel at home in codebases of millions of lines.\nYou know database storage engines deeply: merges or compaction, replication logs, query execution.\nYou understand distributed consensus (Raft or Paxos) and what happens when things fail.\nYou know Linux storage internals: page cache, fsync, FUSE, file systems, and how NVMe and HDDs really behave.\nYou’ve run databases or storage on hundreds of nodes, and led the recovery when an incident hit.\nYou debug with gdb, perf and sanitizers.\nYou measure a change on production data before you call it a win.\nGood to have\nContributions to an open-source database or file system.\nOCaml. Much of our backend is written in it.\nPuppet or a similar configuration management tool.\nWhy Ahrefs?\nWe give smart people real ownership and don’t micromanage them. Here that means a few hundred petabytes and the source code of the systems that hold them. Small team, no layers of process, and the hardware to do the job properly. We value honesty, results and simple solutions over complicated ones.\nAhrefs does not engage with agencies or third-party recruitment providers for the roles we hire for. If we need help, we’ll let you know.\nLocation: Singapore, Tokyo, Palo Alto (CA) or Cambridge (MA). On-site; you’ll need the right to work in the office you choose.\nAhrefs does not engage with agencies or third party recruitment solutions for the roles we hire for. 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