Staff Software Engineer, Data Foundations
Komodo Health·Staff·Remote · Hybrid · United States·$196k–$265k USD
Posted Oct 4, 2026·komodohealth.com
About the job
We Breathe Life Into Data
At Komodo Health, our mission is to reduce the global burden of disease. And we believe that smarter use of data is essential to this mission. That’s why we built the Healthcare Map — the industry’s largest, most complete, precise view of the U.S. healthcare system — by combining de-identified, real-world patient data with innovative algorithms and decades of clinical experience. The Healthcare Map serves as our foundation for a powerful suite of software applications, helping us answer healthcare’s most complex questions for our partners. Across the healthcare ecosystem, we’re helping our clients unlock critical insights to track detailed patient behaviors and treatment patterns, identify gaps in care, address unmet patient needs, and reduce the global burden of disease.
As we pursue these goals, it remains essential to us that we stay grounded in our values: be awesome, seek growth, deliver “wow,” and enjoy the ride. At Komodo, you will be joining a team of ambitious, supportive Dragons with diverse backgrounds but a shared passion to deliver on our mission to reduce the burden of disease — and enjoy the journey along the way.
The Opportunity At Komodo Health
Team: Data Foundations builds the data products behind Komodo's Healthcare Map, the industry's most comprehensive source of de-identified patient data, with more than 1 trillion linked events. We build Burrow, our query and indexing engine, written in Rust. Burrow powers Komodo's applications today, and soon Marmot, our AI platform, returning patient populations in under 300 milliseconds. That's fast enough to feel instant, and no other healthcare data analytics platform responds at that speed. We are a small, senior, hands-on team that builds with AI tools every day.
This role exists to design, build, and scale Burrow as it becomes the engine behind more of Komodo's products. As a Staff-level IC, you'll set technical direction for how the engine stores, indexes, and serves data, and for the APIs that our applications and AI agents rely on. You will partner with Product, Platform, and Labs@Komodo (our applied AI team) to keep Healthcare Map data fast, cost-efficient, and reliable at enterprise scale.
Outcomes & Responsibilities
- Engine Performance: Shipped measurable Burrow engine improvements in query latency, throughput, and cost per query through work on indexing, pruning, memory layout, and storage access patterns.
- AI-Scale Serving: Scaled Burrow's query interfaces for agent-driven traffic, keeping latency low as Komodo's AI agents and LLM-driven products query the Healthcare Map at many times the volume of human users.
- Migration Leadership: Led a major workstream moving existing query workloads from legacy systems onto Burrow without disrupting customers.
- Collaborative Roadmap Delivery: Partnered across Data Product, Labs@Komodo, and Engineering to define technical requirements and deliver scalable, production-grade solutions.
- Platform Hardening: Hardened Burrow's multi-tenant query fleet, with measurable improvements in reliability, observability, failure handling, and cost efficiency.
- Technical Multiplication: Mentored and up-leveled the engineering team, raising the bar for code quality, AI-augmented workflows, and system design.
Competencies & Qualifications
- Systems Programming Depth: Experience writing high-performance systems code in Rust (strongly preferred) or Erlang or C++, owning services end to end, including operating them in production.
- Query Engine & OLAP Internals: Deep knowledge of how analytical engines work under the hood: columnar formats (Parquet, Arrow), indexing and pruning (bloom filters, star-tree, and similar), compression and compaction, query planning and execution, and low-latency, high-RPS serving.
- Architecture & Systems Design: Demonstrated ability to design data models, serving patterns, platform components, and system architectures for complex, high-volume data environments.
- Staff-Level Technical Leadership: Track record of setting technical direction beyond your own team: leading design reviews, mentoring senior engineers, and driving multi-quarter architecture decisions across teams.
- Real-Time and/or AI/ML Enablement: Experience building query or serving infrastructure consumed by AI/ML systems, LLM-driven products, or high-volume real-time traffic.
- Performance Engineering: Comfort profiling and tuning distributed systems across memory, CPU, I/O and NVMe access patterns, caching, partitioning, and failure handling at fleet scale.
