Software Engineer, Superhuman Database Infrastructure

About the role

Software Engineer on the Platform team for Superhuman Docs, focused on the structured data storage layer that powers tables, grids and views. The role involves building storage internals, query planning, performance optimization and eventually growing into technical leadership while collaborating across sync, formula and client teams.

About the company

Superhuman is an AI productivity platform (including Grammarly) on a mission to unlock superhuman potential. Founded in 2009, it serves over 40 million people, 50 000 organizations and 3 000 educational institutions with products such as Grammarly, Superhuman Docs, Mail and Go, and offers a hybrid work model.

Requirements

• 8+ years of industry experience, with at least 5 years on relevant technologies
• Deep experience building or substantially contributing to storage/database internals such as query execution, index management, storage engines or transaction/consistency layers in systems like PostgreSQL, MySQL, RocksDB, SQLite or comparable
• Strong understanding of data layout, serialization formats and access patterns beyond API usage, with hands‑on design decisions about how data is stored and retrieved
• Shipped and operated storage‑layer systems with strict correctness under concurrency, understanding read/write ordering, invalidation hazards and distributed consistency
• Knowledge of write‑ahead logging, crash recovery and checkpoint strategies and their trade‑offs (write amplification, recovery time, storage overhead)
• Proven performance‑engineering and cost‑aware design instincts: profiling, cache behavior analysis, hot‑path identification and principled performance vs. cost decisions at scale
• Ability to work across a large, complex system where the tables layer interacts with sync engine, formula runtime, client rendering and external APIs, reasoning about correctness and performance across boundaries
• Instinct to simplify complex systems and know when to refactor architecture
• Clear communication and influence across engineering, product and platform teams
• Passion for building a flexible, general‑purpose database for non‑technical users that remains invisible, affordable, secure and fast
• Experience with query planning and execution, including evaluating filter predicates, selecting indexes and pushing operations toward the storage layer
• (Bonus) Experience designing storage systems for unpredictable, variable workloads
• (Bonus) Experience with encryption at the storage layer, especially multi‑tenant or per‑customer key isolation, or strong familiarity and rapid learning ability
• (Bonus) Experience with collaborative or distributed systems requiring eventual consistency or conflict resolution (OT, CRDT, etc.)
• (Bonus) Full‑stack experience optimizing TypeScript that runs both on client and server