Why

Engineering jobs are everywhere. But few build generational technology.

Even Big Tech giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon are no exception. When I was working at Google, the NASA Ames Research Center was right next door, and a popular joke circulated: “While our friends next door at NASA are launching rockets, we Google engineers are adjusting pixels with CSS.” Of course, there are plenty of interesting and meaningful projects. However, it is also true that many engineers end up bogged down in trivial tasks, treated like replaceable cogs in a massive factory.

Personally, I’ve had an incredibly fulfilling career where I accomplished everything I set out to do. I worked at my dream company, led the core project on my dream team (as TensorFlow Numerics Lead), and co-founded a startup where I built the New York office from scratch, raised millions of dollars in venture capital, and achieved J-curve growth and profitability. (LinkedIn post)

But in an era where it is uncertain how much time remains for pure software engineering before LLMs completely dominate, I wanted to spend the rest of my career in the most meaningful, rewarding, and exhilarating way possible as an engineer.

Vision

The software development process may seem stagnant at times, but it has actually evolved steadily over the past two decades. The advent of VCS revolutionized collaboration, while the rise of CI, containerization, and orchestrators like Kubernetes standardized deployment and operations. Looking ahead, there are even more promising technologies on the horizon, such as eBPF, Nix, Unikernels, Wasm, QUIC, and RDMA.

Yet, there is still so much left to improve. Kubernetes is needlessly complex, and database architectures have failed to keep pace with rapid hardware advancements. The ubiquity of containers is actually a symptom of our failure to maintain deterministic control over development and deployment environments why aren’t we using Nix?. Meanwhile, the web ecosystem has bloated around JavaScript and Electron, to the point where even a simple desktop application bundles an entire Chromium instance and consumes hundreds of megabytes of memory. Modern web applications are routinely built on top of thousands of dependencies, severely compromising the auditability and reliability of the software supply chain. Furthermore, in a future where almost all code is written by LLMs, formal verification will become paramount—yet our industry has barely scratched the surface.

How

While a software startup can take many directions, we are starting with a project that is both technically profound and has the potential for massive commercial success. While we cannot share all the details publicly, we have a roadmap to build an open-source database that delivers a 10x improvement in cost efficiency for its target workloads. Our goal is to go beyond being a mere alternative and become the new de facto standard in this category.

To enable outstanding individuals to focus entirely on their work, we offer industry-leading compensation on par with Korea’s leading tech giants.

• 💵 Top-Tier Compensation: Salaries on par with Korea’s leading tech giants, combined with the massive equity upside of an early-stage startup—something impossible to achieve at a large tech company.
• 🏠 Housing Support: To foster seamless collaboration and deep immersion, we support co-living in a premium residence in Seoul, providing a private individual room for everyone.
• 🍱 Meals Provided: Fully covered lunch and dinner, so you can focus entirely on your work without any daily hassles.
• 💻 Top-Tier Gear: Large 4K monitors, high-performance workstations, and any other top-of-the-line equipment needed to perform at 100% of your potential.

Who

We are looking for “hackers”—exceptionally talented outliers with both world-class skills and fierce ambition.

• ⚙️ System Engineering: You are someone whose heart beats for low-level optimization, Rust, kernels, I/O stacks, and NUMA architectures.
• 🚀 The Thrill of Deep Immersion: You prioritize technical breakthroughs over comfortable work-life balance, and genuinely enjoy staying up late to debate architectural choices and bury yourself in code to solve complex problems.
• 🎯 Zero-to-One: We are building our core system with a small, elite team. We warmly welcome early-career engineers who possess an exceptional learning curve and the bold ambition to say, “I will build the best system in the world.”

We seek individuals who find intense joy in bringing ideas from state-of-the-art research papers to life, and pushing them even further to evolve the state of the art. Examples:

• Tiny Pointers
• Iceberg Hashing: Optimizing Many Hash-Table Criteria At Once
• Vector Quotient Filters: Overcoming the Time/Space Trade-Off in Filter Design
• CEP-15: Fast General Purpose Transactions
• Flashield: a Hybrid Key-value Cache that Controls Flash Write Amplification

Founder

Kibeom Kim

• Chromium Committer, chromium.org
• Google Tech Lead, TensorFlow / Search / Chrome, 2013-2022
  • TensorFlow Numerics Lead
  • Technical mentor across Google engineering teams.
• Terminal X CTO, 2023-2026
  • Built New York and Seoul engineering teams from scratch
  • Successfully closed multi-million dollar investment rounds. (2022, 2026)
  • Developed Terminal X and achieved profitability within one year of launch.

Apply

• We are currently focusing on hiring for early-career (new grad) and full-time conversion-track internship positions.
• If you have any questions about these roles, feel free to reach out for a coffee chat. You can contact me anytime via LinkedIn message!