Senior Staff Software Engineer (Query Execution)

Location: Portugal — Remote

Company

hirify.global provides an open lakehouse platform for self-service analytics and AI, built on technologies including Apache Iceberg and Apache Arrow.

What you will do

• Design, implement, test, and support query operators, expression evaluation, execution scheduling, runtime planning, and resource management.
• Optimize vectorized processing, concurrency, parallelism, memory usage, data exchange, and disk spilling.
• Investigate query correctness and performance issues using profiles, profiling tools, telemetry, benchmarks, logs, and production data.
• Improve Java and JVM runtime characteristics, including CPU utilization, allocation behavior, garbage collection, and thread behavior.
• Collaborate with Query Planner, Datalake, Product, Support, and field engineering teams on end-to-end query improvements.
• Contribute to technical direction, review designs and code, mentor engineers, and validate AI-assisted implementations.

Requirements

• 5+ years of production software engineering experience, preferably with database systems, query execution, distributed systems, or related areas.
• Strong Java skills; knowledge of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, multithreaded programming, and asynchronous programming.
• Understanding of database internals, query processing, distributed execution, and performance optimization.
• Experience profiling and optimizing CPU, memory, garbage collection, thread behavior, or other runtime characteristics.
• Ability to solve ambiguous technical problems, evaluate tradeoffs, communicate clearly, and take ownership.
• Must be based in Portugal.

Nice to have

• Experience with C++ and distributed or database query engines.
• Knowledge of vectorized execution, query operators, expression evaluation, code generation, or runtime optimization.
• Experience with JVM profiling, memory management, caching, networking, data exchange, execution scheduling, or disk spilling.
• Experience with Apache Arrow, Apache Iceberg, Parquet, Avro, Spark, Hadoop, cloud object stores, or open-source contributions.

Culture & Benefits

• High standards for people, thinking, and action.
• Clear communication, accountability, respect, and a focus on results.
• Equal opportunity workplace with reasonable accommodations available during the application and interview process.
• Remote work from Portugal.