---
title: 'Software Engineer - Systems at Spiral'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-systems-spiral-san-francisco-zkrhm379jqx8'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-04'
---

# Software Engineer - Systems at Spiral

- **Company:** Spiral
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/spiral/5bdff8a4-bc03-4350-9c79-d680c54ec2f5

## Job description

## ABOUT SPIRAL

Spiral builds a fast analytical database for multimodal, multi-rate data streams, on top of the open source Vortex file format. Our users are AI/ML researchers and AI infra engineers developing models in complex domains, such as weather & climate, financial, time-series, genomics, point-clouds, videos, and images. They spend their days waiting on data loaders, writing video or sensor data pipelines, and watching expensive GPUs sit idle on I/O. We make that pain go away.

## WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR:

We’re looking for exceptional engineers with deep experience in low-level, high-performance software and cloud-scale storage systems.

- 5+ years of experience writing high-quality production code
- Strong foundation in operating systems and systems programming
- Proven track record in performance engineering
- Familiarity with tools like Apache Arrow, Parquet, DataFusion, Clickhouse, or DuckDB is a plus
- Understanding of cutting-edge ML infrastructure stack (e.g. PyTorch, CUDA) is also a plus
- Experience with Rust is a bonus
- Willingness to work in-person at our NYC, SF, or London office

## About Spiral

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Spiral builds the multimodal data platform for frontier AI, enabling machine-scale ingestion, storage, and query of video, images, audio, point clouds, sensor streams, tables, and text as a single, versioned, object-store-native system.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A; total funding reported as $42.5M per LinkedIn, conflicting with $22M per CB Insights)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States (with offices in London, UK)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Will Manning (CEO), Robert Kruszewski (President, Co-Founder), Nicholas Gates (CTO, Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Data Infrastructure & Analytics, AI/ML Infrastructure
- **Target customers**: Frontier AI labs, research teams, and enterprise AI groups working at petabyte scale with multiple data modalities (computer vision, robotics, autonomous vehicles, etc.)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: Built for the machine consumer – a database that treats bytes and tensors as first-class citizens, not a human-facing SQL warehouse.

## Products & Services
- **[Spiral Platform](https://spiraldb.com/)**: The core product – a unified multimodal data platform that ingests raw object storage data and materializes model-ready tensors directly into accelerator memory. Supports declarative sampling, time-travel (`asof(T)`), and hybrid deployments across neocloud, tradcloud, and on-prem clusters.
- **[Vortex](https://github.com/spiraldb/vortex)**: An open columnar format created by the team and donated to the LF AI & Data Foundation. Designed for analytical queries and AI workloads, Vortex offers up to 38% smaller files and 10–25× faster decompression than Parquet with ZSTD.
- **Open-source compression libraries**: FastLanes, ALP, FSST, and others – Rust/Zig implementations of state-of-the-art integer and floating-point compression algorithms.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $42.5M (LinkedIn reports rounds including $4.5M seed in 2023, $5.5M seed early 2025, $16.1M Series A in 2024, and $16.5M Series A in 2025). A conflicting source (CB Insights) reports $22M total; both are cited.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: General Catalyst, Amplify Partners, BoxGroup, Redpoint Ventures, Lux Capital (and others)
- **Growth Signals**: 72.7% headcount growth YoY (18 employees), 86.8% monthly website traffic growth, active hiring in London and New York. Vortex accepted as an incubation project at the Linux Foundation.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Multimodal-by-design**: Unlike traditional databases optimized for tabular data, Spiral natively stores and queries video, point clouds, audio, and tensors in a single tree with a unified query language.
- **Object-store native, hybrid architecture**: Eliminates the need to copy or denormalize data between storage and training pipelines.
- **Open-source core**: Vortex and related compression libraries are community-governed, lowering adoption risk and attracting top open-source contributors.
- **Reproducibility built-in**: Immutable raw bytes on typed coordinate frames with `asof(T)` time-travel for every modality.

## Strategic Focus
- **Frontier AI infrastructure**: Solving the bottleneck of moving petabytes of heterogeneous data to accelerator memory. Spiral targets the largest AI research orgs (Mistral appears as a community partner) and pretraining pipelines.
- **Open-source ecosystem growth**: Driving adoption of Vortex as the standard columnar format for AI, with integrations into Apache Iceberg and PyTorch.
- **Talent acquisition**: Aggressively hiring Rust, Zig, CUDA, and systems engineers to scale the platform.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Deep-tech startup with a strong open-source ethos (Vortex, FastLanes, etc.). Company describes itself as “built for the machine consumer” – ideal for engineers passionate about high-performance computing, storage, and AI infrastructure.
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Not explicitly stated, but offices in New York and London suggest a hybrid model; many technical hires are likely remote-friendly.
- **Notable Perks & Engineering Culture**: 63% of employees are in technical roles. Talent sourced from Palantir, Microsoft, Monzo, Carnegie Mellon, and LangChain. The engineering team writes Rust, Zig, and CUDA, and works on bleeding-edge compression and database internals. Small team (18 people) with major impact on the LF AI ecosystem.
- **Career Path**: Fast growth (72.7% headcount increase in a year) means early employees can shape product direction and architecture.

## Sources
1. [spiraldb.com](https://spiraldb.com/)
2. [linkedin.com/company/spiraldb](https://www.linkedin.com/company/spiraldb)
3. [github.com/spiraldb](https://github.com/spiraldb/)
4. [cbinsights.com/company/spiral-6](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/spiral-6)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/spiral](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/spiral)

## Other roles at Spiral

- [Software Engineer - Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-systems-spiral-new-york-tcgf23zmfz9a) — New York, NY
- [Software Engineer - Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-systems-spiral-london-n0pjh797vfgh) — London, United Kingdom
- [Developer Relations Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/developer-relations-engineer-spiral-new-york-5dbcwx6syte4) — New York, NY
- [Software Engineer - Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-systems-specter-san-francisco-5j7d7zwdxhsr) — San Francisco, CA