Who you are

• No previous data infrastructure experience required for this role
• Availability for meetings and impromptu communication during Quora's “coordination hours" (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time)
• A 2025 or 2026 graduate with or pursuing a B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical field
• Interest in scalability challenges and infrastructure technologies
• A passion for learning, always improving yourself and the team around you
• Previous software engineering experience via an internship, work experience, or coding competition
• Passion for Quora's mission and goals
• Knowledge of Python and SQL
• We encourage all candidates who share a passion for growing the world’s knowledge, even those who may not strictly meet all the preferred requirements, to apply, as we know that a diverse range of perspectives can have a significant impact on our products and our culture

What the job involves

• Our small data infrastructure team owns everything data—the data lake, pipelines, query engines, A/B testing infrastructure, dashboards, and visualization tools
• We run on open source technologies like Kafka, Iceberg, Trino, Spark, and Airflow, alongside a few systems we've built in-house, our main programming language is Python
• You'll go through a mentorship program and hands-on technical training, working on meaningful projects across our stack from day one
• We're looking for someone curious about large-scale infra and excited by the chance to improve the reliability of critical services, to drive significant cost and performance wins and to boost productivity improving dev tools used across the company
• Join us on a journey through some of our standout achievements that showcase innovation and collaboration at Quora:
• Migrating a Decade of Redshift Usages to Trino at Quora
• Dive into how we transformed our data ecosystem, enhancing efficiency and performance!
• ⚡ Revamping the Spark Ecosystem at Quora
• Explore our efforts to elevate Spark, our main engine for data processing, making it more powerful and user-friendly for our engineering teams!
• 🎥 Adopting Trino's Fault-tolerant Execution Mode at Trino Summit 2023
• Catch the highlights from our presentation at the Trino Summit, where we shared insights on building resilience in data processing!
• Get inspired by the impact we're making, and imagine the possibilities for your own journey with us!
• Help implement scalable and efficient data architectures, meeting data needs from data scientists, engineers and business partners
• Actively participate in the team’s planning process, discussing team’s priorities and proposing project ideas as you grow your knowledge and ownership in data-infra systems
• Identify and implement improvements to system’s cost efficiency, reducing data storage and processing costs
• Participate in the team’s oncall rotation, helping solve timely reliability incidents

The application process

• We are accepting applications on an ongoing basis. This role is a backfill for an existing vacancy