Tiger Data careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

At the rebrand the founders reported more than 2,000 customers, 3 million active databases, mid eight-figure ARR growing over 100% year on year, 60%+ gross margins, cloud usage up 5x in 18 months, and an open-source community 10 to 20 times larger than the paying base. Customers include Hugging Face, Mistral, Lucid Motors, the Financial Times, Barclays, the European Space Agency, Schneider Electric and Polymarket. Tiger Data has raised over $180M, most recently a $110M Series C in February 2022 led by Tiger Global at a valuation above $1B, with Benchmark, NEA, Redpoint, Icon Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures in every round.

Tiger Data builds PostgreSQL for demanding workloads: TimescaleDB, the open-source Postgres extension for time-series and real-time analytics, Tiger Cloud, its managed platform, TimescaleDB Enterprise for self-hosted deployments, and, since October 2025, Agentic Postgres, a database designed for AI agents with instant copy-on-write forks (Fluid Storage), a built-in MCP server, hybrid vector and BM25 search, and a free tier. The company renamed itself from Timescale to Tiger Data on June 17, 2025, because most workloads on its cloud were no longer time-series and customers saw it simply as the best Postgres. It started in 2015 as an IoT platform and relaunched around its database in early 2017.

Ajay Kulkarni, CEO and co-founder. Co-founded and ran Sensobi (Techstars Boston 2009), acquired by GroupMe in 2011, then led GroupMe's mobile team through the Skype and Microsoft acquisitions; earlier a Windows Mobile product manager at Microsoft and a research analyst at Citigroup. BS and MEng in Computer Science from MIT (2001, 2002) and an MBA from MIT Sloan (2008). He and Mike Freedman were roommates at MIT and started Timescale's predecessor, an IoT platform, together in 2015.

Mike Freedman, CTO and co-founder. Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton, where he has taught since 2007. Built CoralCDN, a peer-to-peer content network that ran from 2004 to 2015, and Ethane, the Stanford project that became OpenFlow and software-defined networking; co-founded Illuminics Systems with Martin Casado in 2006, acquired by Quova the same year. ACM Fellow (2019), Grace Murray Hopper Award (2018), Presidential Early Career Award (2011). SB and MEng from MIT, PhD from NYU's Courant Institute, postdoc at Stanford.

You work on Postgres itself, at scale, in the open. TimescaleDB is one of the most widely used Postgres extensions, the cloud runs millions of databases, and the newer bets (Fluid Storage, pgvectorscale, pg_textsearch, the MCP server) are the kind of storage and query-engine work few companies still do. Engineering postings split into a database internals track and a platform track, and the company says it does not require prior experience with its stack, only enthusiasm for learning it.

It is a real business, not a research lab: 2,000+ paying customers, revenue more than doubling each year, and a decade of operating history, at a size of about 200 people where individual work is still visible. The current openings show the next chapter: an on-prem Enterprise product being brought to market, an EMEA sales team being built, a data-center partner channel in North America, and a testing and release infrastructure being rebuilt for TimescaleDB, Toolkit, Data Tiering and Tiger Lake.

Tiger Data publishes six values: Get Sh*t Done ("We move fast and focus on outcomes. No bureaucracy, no drama, just action and ownership."), Be Direct, with Respect, Be Excellent, but Humble, Embrace the Challenge, Absolutely Own the Outcome ("Everyone's a driver here, not a passenger."), and Win Together. Every job description opens with the same framing: a globally distributed, remote-first team committed to direct communication and accountability.

The company is unusually blunt about who should not apply. Shauna Lassche, Senior Recruiting Manager, in a 2025 post the postings link to: "Our remote-first environment spans numerous time zones. So clear, proactive, and frequent communication through Slack is non-negotiable. Yes, it might feel intensive at times, but it ensures everyone knows who owns what." And: "If you're seeking a remote role just to coast along, this is not the best fit." You will never hear "That's not my job", she writes.

CEO Ajay Kulkarni describes the hiring filter as "people who were really smart but had low egos", so that ego does not get in the way of decisions, and lists "let the best idea win, no matter who says it" among the company's operating rules (Behind Company Lines podcast, 2023). Postings reflect that: the security engineer role explicitly says it is not a fit for people who prefer policy work over building, who view security as a blocking function, or who want to define strategy without executing.

Applications go through the Ashby board linked from each role. Tiger Data commits in every posting to respond to every applicant, to shortlist on relevant skills and experience, and to run "a rigorous interview process with a high bar" in which you meet several people you would work with. For engineering, techinterview.org's 2026 write-up describes five or six conversations after a recruiter screen: hiring manager, a live coding round in C or Go focused on edge cases and testing habits rather than puzzles, a systems design round tied to the product (partitioning, hypertables, continuous aggregates, compression), a behavioral round on ownership and written communication in an async team, and a closing conversation with leadership. Rejections reportedly come from shallow systems reasoning more than failed coding.

Read the location line carefully: some roles are open worldwide, others are restricted to a region or time zone. The support team's own advice is to sign up for the free Tiger Cloud trial and run a tutorial before you apply. No sponsorship or relocation program is published; roles are remote where you already live.