Looking for a technical cofounder for RethinkDB

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Here at RethinkDB, a company I founded with friends from the university to redesign database technology for solid-state drives, we're looking for a technical cofounder. We just finished Y Combinator summer session, and are looking to expand the team.

What you get:

- A significant equity stake.
- Very interesting and challenging work on disruptive technology.
- The opportunity to define a product and lead a team of people to execute
  your vision.
- Introductions to great people: a part of our job is getting advice from extremely
  smart and successful entrepreneurs.
- Free housing and food in sunny California, with the possibility of moving to NYC.
- Some compensation (with room to grow).

What you have (you don't need to have all of these qualifications, but the more, the better):

- The determination to move heaven and earth to make things happen.
- You know C like the back of your hand.
- An understanding of the complexities of systems software, and what it takes to
  make these systems very fast.
- Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen and Leiserson is your trusty friend.
- You have good mathematical intuition.
- You're not afraid of modifying Linux kernel source code.
- You're not afraid of modifying MySQL source code.
- You know a functional language (like Haskell or Lisp) and understand some purely
  functional data structures.
- Implementing software transactional memory (STM) doesn't scare you.
- You have experience scaling a large website.
- You understand database internals (no SQL, we promise).
- For that matter, you think SQL is a terribly designed language.

Here is an example of the kind of work we do: http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2009/10/rethinking-b-tree-block-sizes-on-ssds/.

This blog post has an open problem - given the numbers in the blog post, what is the optimal page size if we can cache 8GB of the B-tree in memory? Assume the cost of memory lookup is negligible, and the queries are uniformly distributed.

If you're interested, please send the solution, your resume, a list of impressive projects you've started (and completed), and a quick blurb about yourself to .