Suggested rewrite: Led a cross-functional initiative that improved [business outcome] by [measurable result], demonstrating experience relevant to this role...
Senior Software Engineer (YDB Team)
Review the role, location requirements, compensation details, and application process before deciding whether this opportunity fits your next career move.
- Remote from
- Europe
- Salary
- Undisclosed
- Department
- Software Engineering
- Employment
- Full Time
- Experience
- Senior
- Published
- Apply before
- 27 Nov 2026
- Listing views
- 51
- Application actions
- 4
Make your next move.
Prepare your resume, explore your fit, and draft a cover letter for this opportunity.
The role, at a glance.
Nebius is seeking a senior C++ engineer to evolve YDB, a distributed database and storage platform underpinning large-scale cloud infrastructure. The role focuses on storage architecture, high-throughput networking, resilience, recovery, erasure coding, and performance optimization across large production clusters. Candidates need substantial experience building high-load C or C++ systems and a deep understanding of low-level systems concepts such as CPU caches, atomics, NUMA, profiling, and debugging. Senior hires may work remotely within the EU and will contribute features that are typically deployed to production within weeks.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Pace & Pressure
5/5Autonomy Level
4/5Communication Load
4/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.
Sample interview questions
I would prioritize recovery traffic separately from foreground I/O, use rate limits that adapt to cluster load, and recover the most critical or under-replicated data first. I would also evaluate parallelism, placement awareness, and telemetry such as tail latency, queue depth, and rebuild throughput to tune the process safely.
I would design writes to remain sequential within zones, minimize random rewrites, and maintain metadata that supports efficient garbage collection and crash recovery. The design should account for zone capacity, write amplification, compaction scheduling, and rebuilding data after failures without violating zoned-write constraints.
Cross-socket memory access, cache-line contention, and poorly chosen atomic synchronization can substantially increase latency and reduce throughput. I would use profiling to locate contention, align and shard hot data structures, avoid false sharing, select suitable memory-order semantics, and keep threads and memory allocations NUMA-local where possible.
I would first establish the affected workload and compare key metrics with a known-good baseline, including CPU, I/O latency, network throughput, queue depth, and error rates. Then I would correlate traces, flame graphs, perf data, and logs across nodes, validate recent changes, reproduce the issue where possible, and deploy a measured mitigation before implementing the permanent fix.
I would combine unit and property-based tests for encoding and reconstruction with fault-injection tests covering disk loss, corruption, interrupted writes, and concurrent recovery. I would also verify placement assumptions, checksum behavior, repair bandwidth, and availability calculations, then run staged production tests with clear monitoring and rollback criteria.
About this role.
About Nebius:
Nebius is leading a new era in cloud infrastructure for the global AI economy. We are building a full-stack AI cloud platform that supports developers and enterprises from data and model training through to production deployment, without the cost and complexity of building large in-house AI/ML infrastructure.
Built by engineers, for engineers. From large-scale GPU orchestration to inference optimization, we own the hard problems across compute, storage, networking and applied AI.
Listed on Nasdaq (NBIS) and headquartered in Amsterdam, we have a global footprint with R&D hubs across Europe, the UK, North America and Israel. Our team of 1,500+ includes hundreds of engineers with deep expertise across hardware, software and AI R&D.
The role
The YDB Development Team at Nebius is hiring mid- and senior-level software developers with C++ expertise.
YDB is an open-source platform with two roles within Nebius:
- Providing the binary object storage foundation for S3 Object Storage, Shared Filesystems and Network Block Storage
- Serving as a distributed relational database and message broker for services such as IAM, billing, audit trails and logging
We operate YDB clusters in more than 10 regions using HDD and NVMe storage. Individual clusters span tens of thousands of nodes, manage hundreds of petabytes of data and deliver terabytes per second of throughput. Our infrastructure includes x86 and Arm-based systems, including NVIDIA GB300 nodes.
What you’ll work on
- Evolve YDB’s architecture for new hardware, redesigning core components when incremental optimization is insufficient:
- QLC NVMe drives: increase storage density while controlling RAM/CPU consumption and write amplification
- Dual 800 Gb/s network adapters: reduce CPU overhead and memory bandwidth consumption to utilize the available NIC bandwidth
- NVIDIA GB300-based systems: ensure efficient operation on Arm-based hosts and offload storage and networking processing to BlueField DPUs
- Support high-capacity SMR HDDs by designing data placement, sequential writes, garbage collection and recovery around zoned-write constraints
- Develop wide erasure-coding schemes to reduce space aplimfication while maintaining durability and availability
- Reduce recovery and rebalancing times after device outages while limiting the impact on foreground workloads
- Prevent, detect and recover from silent data corruption across memory, networking and storage
- Provide the system capabilities and interfaces required by fleet-wide automation so that hundreds of production clusters can be deployed, configured, upgraded, diagnosed and operated consistently
We move quickly and focus on delivering practical value. Features and optimizations merged into the production branch are typically deployed within weeks. You’ll see your work solving real problems in live clusters—not waiting years to make an impact.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of professional experience developing high-load systems in C or C++. Candidates with 3+ years will also be considered if their experience includes relevant work on distributed storage systems
- Experience developing high-performance, low-latency software components
- Understanding of core dumps, flame graphs and sanitizer-enabled builds
- Understanding of CPU caches, atomic operations and NUMA architectures
Nice to have:
- Experience designing and developing production-grade distributed storage systems and/or databases
- Experience with on-disk data structures such as LSM trees and B+ trees, and storage algorithms such as erasure coding and checksumming
- Understanding of NVMe, conventional HDD and SMR HDD internals
- Experience with debugging and profiling tools such as perf, VTune, bpftrace and gdb
- Familiarity with the Linux kernel, SPDK/DPDK, libaio and io_uring
- Knowledge of IP, TCP, UDP and DNS, and ideally InfiniBand or RoCE/RDMA
- Experience with Kubernetes and Grafana
- Experience responding to production incidents
- Knowledge of availability and durability calculations
For Senior candidates, we offer hybrid working or the flexibility to work remotely within EU.
Benefits & Perks:
- Competitive compensation
- Career growth and learning opportunities
- Flexibility and ownership
- Collaborative and innovative culture
- Opportunity to work on impactful AI projects
- International environment and talented teams
What’s it like to work at Nebius:
Fast moving – Bold thinking – Constant growth – Meaningful impact – Trust and real ownership – Opportunity to shape the future of AI
Equal Opportunity Statement:
Nebius is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace and to providing equal employment opportunities in all aspects of employment. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, ancestry, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
Applicants must be authorized to work in the country in which they apply and will be required to provide proof of employment eligibility as a condition of hire.
If you need accommodations during the application process, please let us know.
Annual salary information is not provided for this position. Explore salary ranges for similar roles in our Salary Directory ›
This job listing has been manually reviewed by the Jobicy Trust & Safety Team for compliance with our posting guidelines, including verification of the company's legitimacy, accuracy of job details, clarity of remote work policy, and absence of misleading or fraudulent content.
Apply now.
Follow the employer’s application method and review Jobicy’s safety guidance before sharing personal information.
Continue on the employer website
Protect your personal information and never pay to secure an interview or job offer. .
