Staff Software Engineer, Query Engine [Rust]

The Opportunity at Komodo Health: 

Team: Data Foundations builds the data products behind Komodo's Healthcare Map, the industry's most comprehensive source of de-identified patient data, with more than 1 trillion linked events. We build Burrow, our query and indexing engine, written in Rust. Burrow powers Komodo's applications today, and soon Marmot, our AI platform, returning patient populations in under 300 milliseconds. That's fast enough to feel instant, and no other healthcare data analytics platform responds at that speed. We are a small, senior, hands-on team that builds with AI tools every day.

This role exists to design, build, and scale Burrow as it becomes the engine behind more of Komodo's products. As a Staff-level IC, you'll set technical direction for how the engine stores, indexes, and serves data, and for the APIs that our applications and AI agents rely on. You will partner with Product, Platform, and Labs@Komodo (our applied AI team) to keep Healthcare Map data fast, cost-efficient, and reliable at enterprise scale.

Komodo Health uses modern engineering and AI to tackle healthcare's biggest challenges, turning extraordinary amounts of data into meaningful insights. In this role, you’ll build the core of Komodo's platform and help shape a culture of technical excellence and transparency.

Outcomes & Responsibilities

Looking back on your first 12 months at Komodo Health, you'll have accomplished…

• Engine Performance: Shipped measurable Burrow engine improvements in query latency, throughput, and cost per query through work on indexing, pruning, memory layout, and storage access patterns.
• AI-Scale Serving: Scaled Burrow's query interfaces for agent-driven traffic, keeping latency low as Komodo's AI agents and LLM-driven products query the Healthcare Map at many times the volume of human users.
• Migration Leadership: Led a major workstream moving existing query workloads from legacy systems onto Burrow without disrupting customers.
• Collaborative Roadmap Delivery: Partnered across Data Product, Labs@Komodo, and Engineering to define technical requirements and deliver scalable, production-grade solutions.
• Platform Hardening: Hardened Burrow's multi-tenant query fleet, with measurable improvements in reliability, observability, failure handling, and cost efficiency.
• Technical Multiplication: Mentored and up-leveled the engineering team, raising the bar for code quality, AI-augmented workflows, and system design.

These are the essential job duties you'll be responsible for…

• Query Engine Development: Design, build, and optimize Burrow's distributed query execution, indexing, and storage layers, powering customer-facing APIs, Komodo's software applications, and Marmot.
• AI & Agentic Serving: Design the query APIs, semantic layer, and serving patterns that Komodo's AI products and agents depend on, partnering closely with Labs@Komodo.
• Scalable Data Systems: Design and implement high-performance data processing and serving patterns across large-scale healthcare datasets, with Rust as the primary language, alongside SQL, Python, DuckDB, or Spark where each is the right tool.
• Query Capability Expansion: Extend Burrow beyond patient-centric data, adding healthcare provider data and new query types such as provider-level trends and top-K analytics. 
• Ingest & Consumer Partnership: Partner with upstream data engineering teams on how data enters Burrow, and with the products and platforms built on it, including Marmot, to deliver the APIs and queries they need.
• Cross-Functional Product Delivery: Partner with Product, Data Science, Labs@Komodo, Quality, Platform, and application teams to translate complex healthcare use cases into production-grade technical designs and execution plans.
• Technical Leadership: Lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives, making clear trade-offs across performance, scalability, maintainability, cost, reliability, and time-to-market.
• Quality, Observability & Trust: Define and implement data quality checks, validation frameworks, observability, lineage, monitoring, and alerting to ensure Healthcare Map products and AI-serving data are accurate, explainable, and reliable.
• Engineering Excellence & Mentorship: Raise the bar for system design, code quality, documentation, testing, CI/CD, and operational readiness across the team, and mentor engineers through design reviews, technical deep dives, pairing, and architectural guidance, helping the team make better decisions at scale.

Competencies & Qualifications

What you bring to Komodo Health (required):

• Systems Programming Depth: Experience writing high-performance systems code in Rust (strongly preferred) or Erlang or C++, owning services end to end, including operating them in production.
• Query Engine & OLAP Internals: Deep knowledge of how analytical engines work under the hood: columnar formats (Parquet, Arrow), indexing and pruning (bloom filters, star-tree, and similar), compression and compaction, query planning and execution, and low-latency, high-RPS serving. Experience building on or extending engines such as Pinot, Druid, ClickHouse, DuckDB, DataFusion, or Trino.
• Architecture & Systems Design: Demonstrated ability to design data models, serving patterns, platform components, and system architectures for complex, high-volume data environments.
• Staff-Level Technical Leadership: Track record of setting technical direction beyond your own team: leading design reviews, mentoring senior engineers, and driving multi-quarter architecture decisions across teams.
• Real-Time and/or AI/ML Enablement: Experience building query or serving infrastructure consumed by AI/ML systems, LLM-driven products, or high-volume real-time traffic.
• Performance Engineering: Comfort profiling and tuning distributed systems across memory, CPU, I/O and NVMe access patterns, caching, partitioning, and failure handling at fleet scale.
• Technical Communication: Ability to explain technical decisions, trade-offs, risks, and delivery status clearly to engineers, product partners, data scientists, AI engineers, and senior stakeholders.
• AI-Augmented Engineering: Hands-on use of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, Claude, or similar to improve engineering productivity, design quality, testing, documentation, and decision-making. You'll actively experiment with new AI techniques, share learnings across teams, and contribute to Komodo's AI-first engineering culture.

Additional skills and experience we’d prioritize (nice to have):

• Healthcare Data Experience: Experience with claims, clinical, RWE, provider, patient, or life sciences data, including familiarity with coding systems such as ICD-10, CPT, NDC, RxNorm, NPI, or taxonomy data. Not required; strong engine engineers ramp quickly.
• Warehouse-to-Engine Migrations: Experience moving workloads off Redshift, Snowflake, or similar warehouses onto purpose-built serving infrastructure.
• High-Scale Data Architecture: Experience designing systems for large-volume data processing, productization, versioning, delivery, performance optimization, and cost efficiency, including newer columnar formats like Vortex.
• Applied AI / Agentic Workflows: Experience using, designing, or integrating AI-enabled workflows — including LLM pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, prompt chains, or evaluation frameworks — to improve data quality, extraction, curation, or product delivery.
• Fast-Growth Execution: Experience operating in high-growth or ambiguous environments where technical leaders must balance architecture, delivery, quality, and speed.

Open to remote OR hybrid