About MotherDuck

Don’t let the quirky name fool you! We’re on a mission to radically transform the data analyst user experience. We think we can empower and delight analysts using a novel cloud architecture built on top of DuckDB, an open source foundation with a vibrant community. Our team is a diverse mix of passionate, collaborative and empathetic data industry veterans from Google, Amazon, Meta, Snowflake, SingleStore, Databricks, and the like.

Core Responsibilities

As MotherDuck drives towards general availability, we are eager to commit to an engineering culture that delivers reliable, secure and maintainable services that our users can trust to run their production workloads. We believe strongly that this is a shared responsibility across all of engineering, but also that it takes dedicated and focused attention to build and maintain this culture.

As the DevOps Champion at MotherDuck, you will be the key driver behind how we evolve development, deployment, and observability. You’ll dig in deep to how the systems work and identify patterns and strategies that will enable the entire engineering team to operate high quality production services while still having the flexibility to move quickly.

Are you our founding SRE? Not really, because we aren’t building a separate SRE team (yet? ever?). But you could be if we were.

Will you fix all the broken tests? Of course not. But you understand that having visibility into what is broken where is a key part of keeping things green. You can recommend the most effective way to expand our tests to validate different user environments and backwards compatibility for client versions.

Are you going to build us a fully fleshed out testing environment and release process? Nope, not a priority at our size. But you can help us figure out an efficient strategy for local development and how to cherry pick targeted changes into production.

Perhaps most importantly, you can dive in and get things done in a way that establishes forward momentum across the engineering team. You understand deeply that the best way to channel good intentions into sustained action is to make it easy to do the right thing and drive accountability through the engineering culture.

Requirements

General:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

• 10+ years of experience in a mix of software development / SRE / systems engineering

• Demonstrated ability to influence and drive change across multiple teams

• Self-directed, can get at the core of a problem independently but solve it as a team

• Sense of fun, ability to not take yourself so ducking seriously

Experience with infrastructure management, deployment automation, and scaling:

• Cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP)

• Containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Ansible

• CI/CD pipelines and tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Azure DevOps, etc.)

• Programming/scripting language (e.g., Python, Go, Bash)

Nice to have:

• Experience with SQL databases, such as PostgreSQL and DuckDB

• Experience with C++ or other systems programming language

What we provide

• Competitive compensation and stock options

• For US-based employees:

  • 100% paid medical, dental, and vision for employees

  • 80% paid medical, dental, and vision for dependents

• For Non-US based employees:

  • You probably have a functioning health system and social safety net so healthcare is not a major factor in employment. If that is not the case let us know and we’ll work something out.

• Unlimited Paid Time Off

• 401k plan

• Regular offsites in hub or exotic locations

• Geographically distributed team with hubs in Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, & Amsterdam

Please Apply

Does this role sound appealing to you, but you’re missing some of the requirements or don’t quite think you’re qualified? Please apply anyway. Research has shown that underrepresented groups in technology often shy away from roles which aren’t a 100% match. We aim to build a diverse team and will strongly consider applicants who bring many of the requirements plus have other experiences which round out their qualifications.

MotherDuck is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. MotherDuck is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities.