Principal Engineer

Our Company

At Teradata, we believe that people thrive when empowered with better information. Teradata Autonomous Knowledge Platform activates enterprise intelligence by unifying data, knowledge and business context to achieve tangible outcomes. With Teradata, organizations can provide agents with full context for impact when it matters. Our solution lets businesses connect and scale on premises, in the cloud, or through a hybrid approach. Teradata delivers real business value with AI.

What You’ll Do

As a Principal Engineer, you will play a key role in designing and delivering highly scalable, next generation Database products within our Database Marketplace. You will work in a technically rich environment with talented peers, contributing to product strategy, architecture, and execution while influencing the evolution of Teradata’s DB capabilities.

In this role, you will:

• Design, architect, develop, and maintain high quality systems, services, and applications with an emphasis on scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Collaborate with cross-functional engineers and product partners to shape architecture and consistently deliver end to end features.
• Work on page management, durability guarantees, and consistency semantics across disaggregated compute-storage topologies.
• Extend the logging and recovery subsystem for multi-node and branching workload patterns.
• Build visibility and isolation semantics for non-linear, multi-context execution patterns.
• Own buffer management, prefetch behavior, and cost model correctness when storage is remote.
• Use AI coding agents critically on a large C/C++ codebase.
• Drive implementation-level decisions across global engineering teams.

Who You’ll Work With

You will be part of a high-performing engineering team building core components of Teradata’s AI platform. You will collaborate closely with other engineers, AI/ML specialists, product managers, cloud architects, and partner teams across the company. The role offers opportunities to contribute directly to Teradata’s AI product roadmap and technological direction.

What Makes You a Qualified Candidate

Bachelor’s / Master’s / PhD degree in Computer Science or equivalent from a recognized institution.

15+ years of experience on backend services, distributed systems, or data platform development.

Strong proficiency in C, C++, Rust for development.

Internals experience with PostgreSQL or postgres based relational engine — source-level, not API-level.

Deep understanding of the WAL write path, checkpointing, and crash recovery mechanics.

Ability to trace and resolve concurrency anomalies through the engine's MVCC implementation.

Clear mental model of where traditional storage assumptions live in the executor and buffer manager.

Practical experience with AI coding assistants on production systems engineering work.

What You’ll Bring

Deep expertise in systems or database engineering, with meaningful time spent inside a relational engine at the source level.

Demonstrated contributions to PostgreSQL or an equivalent open-source engine — patches, extensions, or fork-level work.

Production experience with storage or replication subsystems under real failure conditions.

Comfort operating across distributed teams with high autonomy and low process overhead.

A track record of technical decisions that held up — and the judgment to know when to revisit them.

Why We Think You’ll Love Teradata

We prioritize a people-first culture because we know our people are at the very heart of our success. We embrace a flexible work model because we trust our people to make decisions about how, when, and where they work. We focus on well-being because we care about our people and their ability to thrive both personally and professionally.