MTS · Engineering · Systems (Rust)

Nebula is the system of state for enterprise agent workflows, and at its center is a Rust engine that owns how state is represented, stored, queried, and updated. The engine implements Nebula's Hierarchical Vector Graph (HVG) — structured nodes, typed edges, vector representations, and provenance — over a three-tier storage architecture spanning in-memory cache, local NVMe, and S3-compatible object storage. Over time, we expect more of its relationships and execution model to move into latent space.This role owns and evolves that engine — query execution, indexing, concurrency, storage behavior, and performance as datasets grow from terabytes toward petabytes. It focuses on the performance-critical engine itself, not the cloud infrastructure and deployment systems around it.What you'll work onOwn and evolve the Rust engine that represents, stores, queries, and updates Nebula state.Improve execution for HVG traversal, retrieval, filtering, ranking, and index access.Extend indexes that combine graph structure, vector representations, structured metadata, and provenance.Optimize Nebula's three-tier storage system across memory, local NVMe, and object storage.Improve caching, residency, prefetching, promotion, eviction, persistence, and recovery across storage tiers.Keep frequently accessed state available at sub-millisecond latency as graphs and workloads grow.Strengthen coordination under concurrent reads, writes, retries, eviction, and partial execution.Improve memory layout, allocation behavior, synchronization, serialization, and CPU efficiency across latency-sensitive paths.Scale execution across processes and Kubernetes pods, including partitioning, routing, hotspot mitigation, and workload rebalancing.Build and optimize low-latency gRPC interfaces between the engine and Nebula's service layer.Profile and debug lock contention, cache misses, excessive allocation, memory pressure, storage stalls, uneven partitions, and p99 latency regressions.Keep the engine understandable and maintainable as its query surface, storage model, and scale expand.Depending on the week, you might optimize a traversal primitive, remove contention from a write path, improve index locality, redesign an eviction policy, investigate a tail-latency regression, or change how graph state is partitioned across workers.What we're looking forStrong production experience with Rust.Experience building performance-sensitive systems such as databases, storage engines, query engines, runtimes, compilers, networking systems, or distributed services.Strong intuition for concurrency, memory management, data layout, networking, persistence, and storage tradeoffs.Experience reasoning about correctness under concurrent reads and writes.Experience working with datasets larger than memory, tiered storage, caching, buffer management, or durable persistence.Comfort profiling performance across CPU, memory, locking, allocation, serialization, storage, and network boundaries.Experience with partitioning, replication, coordination, or state ownership across processes or nodes.The ability to build abstractions that remain simple as performance requirements and system surface area grow.High ownership and comfort working on systems whose architecture is still evolving.We care more about demonstrated systems judgment and the quality of systems you have built than a particular number of years of experience.Nice to haveExperience building graph databases, vector databases, query engines, storage engines, search systems, or language runtimes.Experience with graph traversal, query planning, indexing, ranking, or execution optimization.Experience with approximate nearest-neighbor indexes, embeddings, or retrieval over latent representations.Experience with page or buffer management, compaction, write-ahead logging, snapshots, or recovery.Experience with lock-free or low-contention data structures.Experience designing distributed partitioning, replication, consensus, or failover mechanisms.Experience optimizing gRPC, Protobuf, or other latency-sensitive RPC systems.Familiarity with systems spanning memory, local NVMe, and object storage.Why ZerosetOwn the engine and state representation at the center of Nebula.Work across the full systems stack, from memory layout and query execution to durable storage and distributed partitioning.Shape fundamental decisions around graph representation, latent retrieval, indexing, concurrency, and tiered storage.Scale a working system toward terabyte- and petabyte-scale graphs while preserving low latency on critical read paths.Join a small, technical team with high trust, low bureaucracy, and direct access to founders and customers.Build foundational infrastructure for agents operating across long-running, real-world enterprise workflows.