Spice AI

Spice.ai is a open source data and AI inference engine. Build AI apps with SQL query federation, acceleration, search, and retrieval for AI grounded in enterprise data.

spice.ai

Spice AI

Spice.ai is a open source data and AI inference engine. Build AI apps with SQL query federation, acceleration, search, and retrieval for AI grounded in enterprise data.

spice.ai

HQUS

Team Size18

Open Jobs4

Total Funding-

Latest FundraiseUnknown

TL;DR

Founded: June 2021

Headquarters: Seattle, Washington

Product: Open-source operational data lakehouse and compute engine for data-grounded AI

Open-source milestone: Spice.ai Open Source 1.0-stable released Jan 22, 2025

Notable customers: Twilio, Barracuda, NRC Health

Company Overview

Problem Domain

Data-grounded AI applications and low-latency inference over enterprise data

Founded

2021

Industry

Technology, Information and Internet

Tech Stack

Rust

SQL federation

Hybrid search

Embedded LLM inference

Funding Track Record

Pre-Seed- Oct 14, 2021

$1M

Announced pre-seed funding round; investors reported include Madrona Venture Group, Picus Capital, TA Ventures and angels such as Nat Friedman and Mark Russinovich.

Seed- Sep 7, 2022

Seed round reported on Sep 7, 2022; multiple investors listed.

Investor Signal

“Madrona Venture Group and several prominent angel/backing investors (including Nat Friedman and Mark Russinovich) participated in early rounds.”

Founders

What we do

Join the Team

Forward Deployed Engineer (Rust)

HybridSan Francisco Bay Area, US

Hybrid • San Francisco Bay Area, US

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Building data-driven AI applications and agents is too complex, even for advanced developers.

This new generation of applications need fast, secure access to data across disparate systems, the ability to search and reason over that data, and infrastructure that’s reliable enough to run in production. Today, teams often need to piece together query engines, search systems, caches, and AI tooling, adding significant complexity along the way.

At Spice AI, we simplify this by unifying query federation, search, and AI into a single runtime for building intelligent applications. Our mission is to make building AI-powered software as easy building a modern web application and help developers build the next generation of applications. We offer both open source and fully managed cloud deployments.

For a deeper dive into the vision, watch Founder and CEO Luke Kim's CMU Databases talk on Spice.ai OSS at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyM-ec1lKfU and read his Materialized View interview at https://materializedview.io/p/building-a-cdn-for-databases-spice-ai.

At Spice AI, we hire for MEI: Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. We're looking for exceptional, ambitious builders who are driven to solve hard problems and push the boundaries of what's possible for AI.

This role requires a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with customers and partners, accelerating adoption through direct engineering contributions. Responsibilities include deploying, optimizing, and extending Spice.ai solutions in production environments, while collaborating on product improvements.

If open source, distributed systems, and real-world search & AI deployment drive you, apply.

Who We Are Looking For

An exceptional engineer
A problem solver who starts with customer problems and solves them with technology
A thinker who challenges the status quo, rejects the current world model, and builds better for everyone
A positive force who asks what's possible instead of focusing on limitations
Someone who views work as meaningful, not just a job
Comfortable with ambiguity and unknowns, leading by creating clarity
Passionate about high performance with high standards

What We're Looking For

In This Role, You'll

Embed with enterprise customers and partners to deploy Spice.ai OSS/Enterprise and Cloud Platform in production
Build, configure, and optimize proof-of-concepts and deployments for performance, scalability, and security
Collaborate with engineering to incorporate customer feedback into core product features
Resolve technical blockers, debug issues, and extend Spice.ai capabilities on-site or remotely
Design end-to-end architectures using Spice.ai for data querying, search, and AI inference
Identify expansion opportunities and drive adoption of new features

Your First 90 Days

First week: Deploy a Spice.ai instance for a customer scenario and fix a deployment issue
First month: Ramp up, lead a POC deployment, and contribute optimizations to Spice.ai OSS
30-60 days: Take ownership of a customer deployment area, from architecture to production rollout
60-90 days: Propose and execute a technical strategy for scaling customer integrations

About Spice AI Founded in June 2021 by Microsoft and GitHub alumni Luke Kim and Phillip LeBlanc, Spice AI creates technology to help developers build intelligent applications and agents that learn and adapt.

Before co-founding Spice AI, Luke was the co-creator of Azure Incubations in the Office of the Azure CTO, where he led cross-functional engineering teams to create and develop technologies including Dapr and OAM.

Spice AI is backed by some of the top industry angel investors and leaders, including Nat Friedman, Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, and Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, who is also on the board.

Spice AI also has notable VC backing from Madrona Venture Group, Basis Set Ventures, Founders' Co-op, and Picus Capital.

Learn more:

On TechCrunch and GeekWire
About the team at spice.ai/careers
The Spice.ai general availability announcement blog post
The Spice.ai OSS project announcement blog post

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

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5+ years in engineering roles, with focus on deploying data, search, and AI systems in enterprise environments

Experience designing, implementing, and scaling production database engines, distributed systems, search engines, and data & AI pipelines

Track record of strong design, architectural, engineering, and product decisions in customer-facing contexts

Excellent communication skills

Ability to ramp up quickly and deliver impact

Contributions to open-source projects preferred

Experience with Apache infrastructure, CNCF stack, or cloud-native development

Deep knowledge of databases, data warehousing, data lakes, search, virtualization, and mesh principles

Proficiency with Databricks, Snowflake, Starburst, Dremio, ElasticSearch, or similar

Strong SQL skills in queries, syntax, modeling, and optimizations

Familiarity with data storage like HDFS, Amazon S3, and relational databases

Skills in data integration, including ETL/ELT, ingestion, and transformation

Ability to tune performance and optimize systems

Knowledge of data security, privacy, authentication, authorization, and encryption

Problem-solving for complex data challenges

Presentation skills for technical and executive audiences

Ability to explain concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders

Relationship-building with customers and partners

Willingness to travel 20%+ based on customer needs

Work side-by-side with founders as a leader in customer success engineering

Contribute to Spice.ai OSS improvements based on real-world usage

Own initiatives to refine offerings and deliver superior developer experiences