Storage / Systems Engineer (Rust + Python)

About the role

Purple8 is an embedded multi-model database (graph + vector + document + full-text) that runs in-process — one binary, one port, zero external services. The storage engine is the heart of the product: a high-throughput write path with a write-ahead log, strong durability guarantees, and a memory model engineered for large corpora on modest hardware. It's the most important — and most concentrated — part of the system, and you'd own it.

What you’ll own

• Own the storage engine and write-ahead log end to end.
• Advance the engine's memory-management and resource-efficiency work.
• Harden crash recovery, durability, and startup replay to a very high bar.
• Profile and eliminate hot-path overhead across the native/Python boundary.

What we’re looking for

• Systems programming in Rust, and comfort at the Rust/Python boundary.
• Database internals: write-ahead logging, durability, memory management.
• Comfort profiling and reasoning about memory and allocation behavior.
• A correctness-first mindset — a very high quality bar for shipping.

Nice to have

• Vector search / ANN (e.g. HNSW) familiarity.
• Lock-free / concurrent data-structure experience.
• Prior work on an embedded DB, LSM, or other storage runtime.