QuestDB is hiring an engineer to make its database benchmarks reproducible

Why it matters

Enterprise database buyers need to validate performance and deployment risks against their own workloads before committing. QuestDB's listing makes that customer-side testing, and the resulting evidence for technical and security teams, a defined part of its sales process.

QuestDB is hiring a North America pre-sales engineer to own the technical work before enterprise deals are signed, from customer discovery and proofs of concept to architecture approval, security review, and the first production workload. The listing describes a hands-on individual-contributor role working with the sales team, CEO Nicolas Hourcard, CTO Vlad Ilyushchenko, and QuestDB's core engineers. It does not say whether this is a new position or how many people currently do the work.

The evaluation process is built around evidence the buyer's engineers can check. The hire will agree on written success criteria and a timeline, load representative customer data, design schemas and queries, then run benchmarks the customer's own engineers can reproduce. QuestDB says most evaluations are for new projects at companies with incumbent systems, so the engineer will also need to explain how the proposed architecture and measured performance compare with what those teams already run. QuestDB's comparison materials include kdb+ and InfluxDB; its QuestDB 10.0 release also reports performance comparisons with ClickHouse and TimescaleDB.

The work extends beyond query speed. The engineer will discuss sizing, replication, high availability, backup and recovery, and deployments in customer-controlled cloud environments on AWS or Azure. The listing also calls for experience with Kubernetes, role-based access control, TLS, single sign-on, storage tiering, and Parquet queries. The hire will answer security questionnaires and RFPs, support vendor due diligence, and hand closed deals to support and engineering with a record of what was built, configured, and promised. Customer findings and product gaps go back to the CTO and engineering team.

That scope reflects the product QuestDB is selling: an open-source, low-latency time-series database that QuestDB says can ingest millions of events per second, run SQL over live and historical data, and use Parquet and Iceberg for storage. Its Enterprise offering adds features including replication, automatic failover, read replicas, access controls, and a stated 99.9% uptime SLA. QuestDB's August 6th, 2026, QuestDB 10.0 release introduced QWP, a binary protocol for ingestion and streaming query results into Apache Arrow, along with beta Live Views and additional Parquet capabilities. QuestDB's release post reports QWP benchmarks of about 3.6 times the network ingestion of InfluxDB Line Protocol and 220 million rows per second streamed into Arrow. QuestDB ran those tests; they are not general database rankings.

QuestDB presents its production footprint as proof that the software is being evaluated for demanding workloads. The job listing says the database runs at tier-one banks, exchanges, trading firms, hedge funds, crypto platforms, and energy operators across four continents. QuestDB also lists organizations including B3, Brevan Howard, BTG Pactual, and Marex among its customers or deployments. These are QuestDB-reported claims, not independently audited usage figures. The public GitHub repository shows about 17,300 stars, while QuestDB reports more than 170 open-source contributors and more than 5,000 Slack members on its about page.

QuestDB is headquartered in London and New York, and the role is aimed at someone based in New York or elsewhere on the US East Coast who can regularly meet customers in New York. The founders' backgrounds fit the product's technical pitch: QuestDB says Ilyushchenko built low-latency electronic-trading systems at HSBC, UBS, RBC, and BP, while Hourcard previously worked at Nasdaq and Rothschild. Both are identified as co-founders on QuestDB's about page.

QuestDB's funding history adds context for its enterprise-sales hiring. It raised a $2.3 million seed round led by Episode1 Ventures in 2020, with Seedcamp and other investors participating, according to TechCrunch. In 2021, QuestDB announced a $12 million Series A led by 468 Capital, with Uncorrelated Ventures and more than 15 open-source founders and executives participating, according to the funding announcement.