---
title: 'Database Engineer at Ahrefs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/database-engineer-ahrefs-cambridge-05y1m37jd59s'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-06'
---

# Database Engineer at Ahrefs

- **Company:** Ahrefs
- **Location:** Cambridge, MA / Palo Alto, CA / Singapore / Tokyo, Japan
- **Posted:** 2026-10-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-06
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/ahrefsjobs/jobs/6235786004

## Job description

Own the data layer behind one of the biggest crawlers on the web.

Ahrefs helps marketers get their brands found in search, in AI answers and on social. Under the product sits one of the largest datasets on the web, and someone has to keep it fast, correct and alive.

The team

The Database team owns our databases and storage end to end, from the source code to production. We run ClickHouse, MooseFS, SeaweedFS, TiDB and Elasticsearch on about 1,200 servers holding hundreds of petabytes, in data centres in Singapore, the US and the UK.

We don’t file tickets with vendors and wait. When a system doesn’t do what we need, we change its source, prove the change on production data and roll it out ourselves.

The job

You’ll build and run our data layer: ClickHouse, the MooseFS and SeaweedFS storage under it, and the TiDB and Elasticsearch clusters beside it. You write the code, you ship it, and you’re there when it meets production. You’ll work with AI coding agents as a normal part of the job.

Examples of what you’ll work on

- Build storage and query features in ClickHouse, such as replication over a shared file system, and storage policies that place data by its merge history.
- Keep up with upstream ClickHouse LTS releases, keep CI green and ship our own releases regularly.
- Make MooseFS and SeaweedFS highly available and durable: Raft-based metadata servers, follower reads, an intent log, automatic re-replication.
- Find performance problems in production profiles and fix them in the code, from query plans to FUSE clients.
- Trace data corruption to its root cause, even when it’s in compression, the memory allocator or the compiler, and repair the damaged data.
- Roll out releases and storage migrations across about 1,200 servers in three regions, without downtime.
- Run and tune TiDB, TiKV, TiCDC and Elasticsearch: scheduling, replication lag, backups, disk balance.
- Check risky designs with TLA+ and fault injection, and automate whatever repeats with watchdogs, balancers and dashboards.
- Build an SRE agent that watches our database clusters, diagnoses incidents and proposes fixes.

You’re probably right for this if

- You write strong C++, C and Rust, can work in Go, and feel at home in codebases of millions of lines.
- You know database storage engines deeply: merges or compaction, replication logs, query execution.
- You understand distributed consensus (Raft or Paxos) and what happens when things fail.
- You know Linux storage internals: page cache, fsync, FUSE, file systems, and how NVMe and HDDs really behave.
- You’ve run databases or storage on hundreds of nodes, and led the recovery when an incident hit.
- You debug with gdb, perf and sanitizers.
- You measure a change on production data before you call it a win.

Good to have

- Contributions to an open-source database or file system.
- OCaml. Much of our backend is written in it.
- Puppet or a similar configuration management tool.

Why Ahrefs?

We give smart people real ownership and don’t micromanage them. Here that means a few hundred petabytes and the source code of the systems that hold them. Small team, no layers of process, and the hardware to do the job properly. We value honesty, results and simple solutions over complicated ones.

Ahrefs does not engage with agencies or third-party recruitment providers for the roles we hire for. If we need help, we’ll let you know.

Location: Singapore, Tokyo, Palo Alto (CA) or Cambridge (MA). On-site; you’ll need the right to work in the office you choose. Ahrefs does not engage with agencies or third party recruitment solutions for the roles we hire for. If at any point we need help, we'll let you know!

## About Ahrefs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Ahrefs is a bootstrapped SaaS marketing platform that helps brands become discoverable online through AI-powered SEO and marketing intelligence tools.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped)
- **Headquarters**: Singapore (Marina One East Tower, 7 Straits View, #08-02, Singapore 018936)
- **Founded**: Not publicly available (references to “15 years of crawling the web” suggest ~2010)
- **Founders**: Not publicly available

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Marketing intelligence, SEO, AI-driven search & content marketing
- **Target customers**: B2B – marketers, SEO professionals, content teams, agencies (44% of Fortune 500 use Ahrefs)
- **Mission or purpose**: “First do it, then do it right, then do it better” – helping people see and be seen on the web; making brands discoverable and unmissable online.

## Products & Services
- **Ahrefs AI Marketing Platform**: An all-in-one suite for planning, publishing, getting discovered, measuring, and optimizing online presence. Backed by 15 years of web crawl data and AI capabilities.
- **Agent A**: An AI marketing agent with unrestricted access to Ahrefs’ full dataset and pre-built “skills” trained by the Ahrefs team. Supports switching between Claude, Gemini, and other models.
- **Yep Search**: A separate search engine product (mentioned on the tech page).
- **Core SEO Tools** (inferred from platform): Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Content Explorer, Rank Tracker, Webmaster Tools – all powered by a massive proprietary web crawl (170 trillion links, 41.9 billion keywords, 400 million domains indexed).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (bootstrapped, no external funding)
- **Key Metric**: User growth – 19,715 users joined in the last 7 days (as of mid-2025); 44% of Fortune 500 companies use Ahrefs.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: None – fully bootstrapped.
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid AI product launch (Agent A), expanding from SEO into broader marketing intelligence, large-scale infrastructure (170T links, 41.9B keywords), global user base across 143 teammates and 26 locations.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Bootstrapped independence**: No investor pressure, full control over product direction and long‑term vision.
- **Proprietary crawl infrastructure**: In‑house systems crawled the entire web for 15+ years – unmatched data scale and freshness for marketing insights.
- **OCaml & high‑performance engineering**: Backend built on OCaml for reliability and performance; contributes heavily to the OCaml ecosystem.
- **AI with unrestricted data access**: Agent A has full access to Ahrefs’ raw data (not a filtered API), giving it a unique advantage over competitors.
- **Simple, autonomous culture**: Engineers own products end‑to‑end; flat hierarchy, low-ego, and high trust.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI‑first marketing**: Integrating AI deeply across the platform (Agent A, LLM tuning, dense retrieval) to turn raw data into actionable insights.
- **Expanding beyond SEO**: Positioning Ahrefs as a comprehensive “AI marketing platform” that covers content, discovery, and measurement.
- **Global team growth**: Hiring remotely and in hubs (Singapore, Palo Alto, Cambridge) to scale both engineering and marketing teams.
- **Continuous infrastructure improvement**: Maintaining and evolving the world‑scale crawler, search engine, and data processing pipelines.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Fast‑moving, flat hierarchy, low‑ego, autonomy, and a “do it, do it right, do it better” motto. Described as “offbeat mix of people who love tech and challenges.”
- **Hiring process**: No LeetCode, no coding puzzles, no whiteboard exercises. Takes home task and unstructured technical discussions. Recruiter screen → take‑home task → interview → offer.
- **Remote & hybrid**: Work from anywhere with a remote equipment budget; also offices in Singapore, Palo Alto, and Cambridge. Spend 2 weeks a year in an office for in‑person time.
- **Perks**: Generous PTO (flexible vacation), conference budget, annual retreat (ski trip), modern office setup with premium coffee equipment.
- **Engineering highlights**: Trusted with high agency; a single developer can take a tool from idea to production; open source contributions; no red tape.

## Sources
1. [ahrefs.com/careers](https://ahrefs.com/careers) – Hiring process, culture, perks, locations
2. [ahrefs.com/about](https://ahrefs.com/about) – Mission, bootstrapped status, team size (143), locations, 15 years of crawling
3. [ahrefs.com/team](https://ahrefs.com/team) – Team photo, description of “offbeat” culture
4. [ahrefs.com/tech](https://ahrefs.com/tech) – Tech stack (OCaml, Melange/ReasonML, Python), infrastructure, engineering principles
5. [ahrefs.com](https://ahrefs.com/) – Platform description, Agent A, user growth stats, Fortune 500 adoption, crawl data scale

## Other roles at Ahrefs

- [Brand Communications Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/brand-communications-manager-ahrefs-cambridge-d54215xrg7rw) — Cambridge, MA / Palo Alto, CA / Singapore / Tokyo, Japan
- [Enterprise Implementation Specialist, Americas](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-implementation-specialist-americas-ahrefs-cambridge-s3ngbjx51hyr) — Cambridge, MA / Palo Alto, CA
- [Marketing Manager, Brazil](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-manager-brazil-ahrefs-remote-g7k3ctvah9p2)
- [Community & Partnerships Marketing Manager, Japan](https://feeny.ai/job/community-partnerships-marketing-manager-japan-ahrefs-tokyo-b3re94b71fke) — Tokyo, Japan
- [Product Designer - Letaido](https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-letaido-ahrefs-cambridge-89gjmsyv898y) — Cambridge, MA / Palo Alto, CA / Singapore / Tokyo, Japan
- [Head of Growth/Organic - Letaido](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-growth-organic-letaido-ahrefs-cambridge-he0hp0fhc978) — Cambridge, MA / Palo Alto, CA
- [Product Marketer - Letaido](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketer-letaido-ahrefs-cambridge-b1dgbqkb7ka1) — Cambridge, MA / Palo Alto, CA
- [Head of Performance Marketing - Letaido](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-performance-marketing-letaido-ahrefs-cambridge-8hvk4433qrj7) — Cambridge, MA / Palo Alto, CA
- [Head of Influencer Marketing - Letaido](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-influencer-marketing-letaido-ahrefs-cambridge-4xgbw89b3d8m) — Cambridge, MA / Palo Alto, CA
- [Marketing Manager, Indonesia Market](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-manager-indonesia-market-ahrefs-singapore-m2vnhar2fdtv) — Singapore