Senior Software Engineer – SpacetimeDB Core

Senior Software Engineer – SpacetimeDB Core

Clockwork Labs is a remote-first technology company building infrastructure for massive real-time distributed applications. Our flagship product, SpacetimeDB, is a high-performance serverless database and platform for real-time, large-scale shared-state systems. It is battle-tested through our own cross-platform MMO, BitCraft Online, and is now expanding beyond games to demanding web and real-time applications.

We are a small, highly skilled team that values ownership, a flat structure, and close collaboration. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the team working on the core of SpacetimeDB: the transaction engine, storage and commitlog, and the client protocols. This is a role for someone with deep Rust and database-internals experience.

Role Responsibilities

Hands-on engineering

• Design, build, and maintain core components of SpacetimeDB.
• Investigate and resolve bugs in the database: deadlocks, race conditions, data-store and commitlog inconsistencies, and performance regressions.
• Review pull requests thoroughly.
• Set expectations for how the team uses AI tooling without lowering the bar for correctness, testing, or maintainability.
• Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions.

Community and operations

• Engage with the SpacetimeDB developer community and support users and customers directly when needed.
• Participate in a weekly on-call rotation.
  
  

Qualifications

Required

• Expert-level Rust and Cargo, including a deep understanding of ownership, lifetimes, and memory allocation.
• Solid understanding of database internals: MVCC, transactions, write ahead logs, and storage engines.
• Ability to reason about concurrency and systems-level problems such as deadlocks, lock contention, and I/O issues.
• Strong knowledge of Linux internals: system calls, how they affect user programs, and how the kernel, file system, and storage layer (including network-attached storage) affect disk I/O.
• Experience managing breaking changes, versioning, and backward compatibility in systems with existing users.
• Proficiency with Git, GitHub, and GitHub Actions, and a track record of rigorous code review and testing.
• A pragmatic view of AI in software development: you know where the tools help and where they fall short, and you can review AI-generated code critically without dismissing it outright.
• Clear written and verbal communication with a multidisciplinary team.
• Comfort supporting external developers and customers in a public community.

Preferred

• Distributed systems and networking experience (TCP, HTTP, WebSocket).
• Familiarity with WebAssembly runtimes.
• Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud providers such as DigitalOcean or AWS.
• Open-source contribution or maintenance.
• Experience across Windows, macOS, and Linux.
  

Working at Clockwork Labs

Clockwork Labs is a fully remote global team. We meet daily, so successful applicants will need to be available during our core collaboration hours.

Our goal is to provide fair and equitable compensation based on market location as well as an individual candidate's specific qualifications for an open role. Consequently, high cost of living areas may expect offers in the higher end of the range whereas lower cost of living areas may expect offers in the lower end of the range. Offers may also be adjusted based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and other objective business considerations.

Subject to the same considerations, the total compensation package for this position may also include equity awards, in addition to a range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if a candidate receives an offer of employment.