Staff Infrastructure Engineer

About the Company

Espresso AI’s mission is to use machine learning to automate performance engineering. We help customers reduce Snowflake and Databricks SQL compute costs by up to 70%, unlocking massive efficiency gains without requiring any workflow changes. We are a well-funded, early-stage startup led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale Espresso’s distributed execution and scheduling systems
• Develop internal compute environments to safely offload workloads from Snowflake and Databricks
• Implement compiler-style analysis and optimization of SQL workloads
• Build infrastructure and data pipelines that support ML modeling and product features
• Improve performance, reliability, and observability across the platform
• Influence architectural decisions and contribute to engineering strategy
• Mentor junior engineers to foster strong engineering fundamentals

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience
• Strong fundamentals in systems design, performance engineering, and debugging
• Ability to own complex technical projects end-to-end
• Comfort operating across a broad range of infrastructure challenges

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at small startups
• Background in data warehouse cost optimization
• Experience with workload orchestration, query execution, scheduling, or runtime systems
• Exposure to SQL optimization
• Experience with software verification

Benefits

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401k with 4% match
• Employee-friendly equity terms (early exercise)
• Free salads & gym membership