R-10 · CONSENSUS DATA TERMINAL
PILOTFounding Query Engine Engineer, Consensus Data Terminal
An analyst who waits eight seconds stops asking questions. Everything interesting about this product happens on the near side of that latency budget.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£230,000 to £390,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.55% to 1.20% of the Terminal
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
The Terminal joins a customer's own records to a belief corpus that grows every day, resolves entities across both, and is expected to answer in the time it takes somebody to keep thinking. That is a query engine problem: planning, pushdown, caching, materialisation, and knowing which of those to reach for on a workload nobody has seen before.
The corpus is not a static warehouse. It accumulates continuously, entities move as resolution improves, and a question asked twice a week apart should not silently mean two different things. Making that fast and making it honest turn out to be the same job, and it currently has nobody on it.
More on the company itself: Consensus Data Terminal →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Week one: take the three slowest real pilot queries, profile them properly, and write up where the time actually goes. We have suspicions and they are probably wrong. Your write-up is likely to redirect the roadmap rather than fit into it.
A normal Tuesday: planner and execution work in a long uninterrupted block, a conversation with whoever is building the surface about which shapes of question are worth optimising for, and periodic time with the resolution models, because a join that got smarter this week usually got slower too.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
A compiled language where execution happens, a columnar store, Postgres, and caching and materialisation layers you will largely design. Working at the level of plans, statistics and physical operators matters far more here than which engine you did it in before.
We do not screen on tools. Nothing above is a requirement, and a stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work. If you have gone deep in something else and would arrive with a view about why half of this is the wrong choice, that is an argument we would like to have.
03
What you would own
Not a ticket queue and not a slice of somebody else’s roadmap. Four things with your name against them in the decision log, from the first fortnight.
01
The plan
How a question becomes work, and how that work stops being more than it needs to be.
02
Latency
The budget inside which an analyst will keep asking questions.
03
Freshness
A corpus that grows continuously, without a question quietly changing meaning.
04
Cost
Interactive speed on a substrate that stays affordable at pilot scale and past it.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have done real query performance work: planning, pushdown, indexing, materialisation, or execution internals
- ▸You profile before you optimise, and you can show the evidence behind a change
- ▸Comfort in a compiled language and with the shape of columnar execution
- ▸You have hit an interactive latency target on a workload you did not control
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸You have worked on a database, a query engine or an analytics engine from the inside
- ▸Vectorised execution, adaptive planning or cost-based optimisation
- ▸Incremental or streaming materialisation
- ▸You have made something fast without making it wrong, and can describe the temptation you resisted
Nothing in the preferred column is a filter, and neither list is applied before a human reads you. No degree is required for anything on this page, and we have hired people with doctorates and people with no degree at all into the same rooms. If you meet most of the minimum and not all of it, write anyway and say in the first paragraph which part you do not meet.
05
Pay, and everything around it
£230,000 to £390,000 base, plus 0.55% to 1.20% of the Terminal, reviewed upward annually without you having to ask. The band is published here rather than discovered three conversations in, and the offer is the same whether or not you negotiate, because the band is the band.
Everything else is what the whole group gets and is not negotiated per offer: a holiday floor rather than a ceiling, health and dental and vision for your family, sixteen to twenty weeks of parental leave for every parent, a funded setup, monthly paid group meetups somewhere in the world, one required funded trip abroad each year, a protected day a week on the research ventures, and no non-competes.
The full list, the salary band chart and the visa sponsorship map are on the careers page. We sponsor without qualification across seventeen jurisdictions and publish exactly which.
06
Apply for this role
Four steps: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, one real problem drawn from work we are genuinely doing, a working session on your solution, and a decision within a week of that session. The problem is paid if it runs long, and you keep the work either way.