Software Engineering Manager, Database (SmithDB)

San Francisco · USD 240,000-300,000 · 7+ years experience · Full-time · Onsite · Posted Oct 5, 2026

At a glance

At LangChain, our mission is to make intelligent agents ubiquitous. We build the foundation for agent engineering in the real world, helping developers move from prototypes to production-ready AI agents that teams can rely on. We began as widely adopted open-source tools and have grown to also offer a platform for building, evaluating, deploying, and operating agents at scale.
With $125M raised at Series B from IVP, Sequoia, Benchmark, CapitalG, and Sapphire Ventures, we’re at a stage where we’re continuing to develop new products, growth is accelerating, and all team members have meaningful impact on what we build and how we work together. LangChain is a place where your contributions can shape how this technology shows up in the real world.
Today, our platform includes LangSmith (Observability, Evaluation, Deployment, Fleet, and Sandboxes), our open source frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, and Deep Agents), and the newly launched LangSmith Engine for autonomous agent improvement. We have 100M+ monthly open source downloads, 6,000+ active LangSmith customers, and 5 of the Fortune 10 use LangSmith in production (+ 35% of the Fortune 500 overall), including teams at Klarna, Clay, Coinbase, Workday, Lyft, Cloudflare, Harvey, Rippling, Vanta, LinkedIn, Monday.com, Nvidia, and Bridgewater.

We're looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead the SmithDB team.
This is not a pure people-management role, as you'll write production code, review PRs at the systems level, make architectural calls, and be in the weeds alongside your engineers.
At the same time, you'll own team health, hiring, technical roadmap, and coordination with the broader LangSmith platform.

Write and review production Rust code across ingestion, query execution, and storage layers
Lead architectural decisions on storage format, compaction, indexing, and query planning
Drive performance investigations using memory and CPU profiling tools; own the path from profiling to shipped fix
Design and harden the distributed deployment of SmithDB services on Kubernetes (multi-tenant, high-throughput, low-latency)
Contribute to cloud object store integrations (S3, GCS, Azure Blob) and set the standard for how SmithDB manages data at rest and in flight
Build and maintain observability for the engine itself: metrics, tracing, debug tooling
Manage a small but growing team of systems engineers: set goals, run 1:1s, provide technical mentorship, and grow careers
Own the SmithDB technical roadmap in partnership with LangSmith product and engineering leadership
Communicate progress, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to the broader organization: you write concise, decision-ready updates

7+ years in systems or database engineering, with at least 2 years in a technical lead or engineering management role
Production Rust experience — you can write it, review it, and have opinions on how to structure it at scale
Deep understanding of database or storage engine internals: query execution, storage layouts, indexing, compaction
Proficiency in systems performance analysis: memory allocators, CPU hotspots, lock contention, async runtimes (Tokio)
Experience deploying and operating distributed services on Kubernetes in a production, multi-tenant environment
Familiarity with cloud object storage (S3-compatible APIs, consistency models, cost/performance tradeoffs)
Proven track record of managing engineers — you can recruit, retain, and level-up a team without losing your technical edge