Principal Systems Developer - Kernel

About the role

The InterSystems IRIS data platform is the engine behind some of the world's most important applications. At its core is a super scalable, high performance database engine built to naturally and flexibly store data accessed from multiple data models, including multi-dimensional arrays, key/value, relational tables, and objects. The database engine runs on a variety of operating systems including Linux, AIX and Windows. It's designed to scale on large NUMA machines, distributed cache clusters, and the cloud.

The database kernel team needs a creative and motivated developer to join them in designing, implementing and enhancing components of the database engine and its embedded programming language. As part of a small team at the center of the data platform, you can expect to make a large impact with a high degree of independence.

Responsibilities

• Compose elegant, efficient, reliable and maintainable source code in C, with some C++
• Analyze, develop and optimize algorithms and data structures for efficiency in memory and/or modern storage devices
• Analyze and understand concurrency control and memory ordering issues around access to shared memory structures
• Learn, maintain and extend the embedded database programming language (ObjectScript) that comprises the application interface to the database
• Enhance interactions with modern operating systems and hardware devices
• Develop and maintain database management APIs
• Debug complex problems; develop and run test code
• Compose internal design documentation and guide external documentation
• Stay up to date with operating system, storage and database technology

Experience Required

• 10+ years developing low-level system code for mission-critical software
• Experience in C or C++; assembly is a plus.
• Strong technical knowledge of computer architecture, operating systems, concurrency control, compiler and interpreter methods, and software engineering techniques
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Commitment to creating robust code to run for decades in high-stakes deployments
• Experience using AI-assisted tools (e.g. copilots, summarisation tools, or chatbots) with an ability to critically evaluate and verify AI-generated outputs
• Demonstrated ability to learn, evaluate, adapt to, propose and implement AI-augmented workflows in order to continually enhance your own, and the team's productivity
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field

Pay and benefits

InterSystems is providing a current good faith estimate of the anticipated base salary range for this position depending on a variety of factors including experience, education, skills, and performance.

Other compensation may include a discretionary annual variable target incentive.

Benefits

The company also provides generous employee benefits including:

• Medical, vision, and dental insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability, and life insurance
• 401(k) Profit Sharing Contribution
• Paid Time Off and Holidays
• Parental Leave
• Tuition reimbursement

The estimated base compensation range for this role is

$144,000—$205,000 USD