Principal Software Engineer - Optimizer

Company: TiDB
Location: Sunnyvale
Posted on: February 17, 2026

Job Description:

Job Description Job Description Join us as we scale our business by building on our tremendous success around the world. The massive database market is going to double over the next few years and TiDB is a global player positioned as a major disruptor with TiDB Database and Database as a Service offering. TiDB is an open-source, cloud-native, distributed SQL database for elastic scale and real-time analytics. Large and high-growth organizations in markets as varied as financial services, logistics, gaming, e-commerce and software as a service have successfully deployed and expanded their TiDB footprint on mission-critical applications. Our strong open-source community roots (39,500 stars on GitHub), innovative products and inclusive culture draw passionate and dedicated people to our company. Learn more about TiDB careers and join our team to be at the forefront of innovation and growth. Role Overview As a Principal Engineer on the TiDB Optimizer team, you will be a key technical leader responsible for the architectural vision and execution of our query optimization engine. Your work will directly impact the performance, reliability, and predictability of one of the most critical components of the TiDB database. You will tackle deep and complex challenges in query planning, cost-based optimization, and adaptive processing to ensure TiDB remains a world-class distributed SQL database for our global users. This is a high-impact role that offers the opportunity to shape the future of data infrastructure for thousands of companies. Responsibilities 10 years of experience in software development with a proven track record of designing, building, and shipping complex database systems or data-intensive distributed systems. Extensive hands-on experience in the design and development of a database query optimizer (e.g., cost-based optimization, query rewrites, join ordering, cardinality estimation, statistics collection). Strong expertise in concurrency, multithreading, and synchronization primitives. Fluency in one or more of the following: C, C++, Go, Rust, or Java. Experience developing in Unix/Linux environments. Qualifications Familiarity with existing query optimizer frameworks like Apache Calcite or GPORCA. Practical experience with other database or data processing technologies such as Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Flink, or Spark. Tackle some of the most challenging problems in distributed databases and query optimization. Your work will be critical to the performance of thousands of TiDB clusters worldwide. Join a world-class team of database kernel engineers and be a recognized technical leader. Contribute to a leading open-source project with a vibrant and active community. We encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply. Come advance with us! In keeping with our values, no employee or applicant will face discrimination/harassment based on: race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, age, gender, marital domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status, or veteran status. TiDB also strives to prevent other, subtler forms of inappropriate behavior (e.g., stereotyping) from ever gaining a foothold in our organization. Whether blatant or hidden, barriers to success have no place at TiDB.

Keywords: TiDB, Stockton , Principal Software Engineer - Optimizer, IT / Software / Systems , Sunnyvale, California