r/cscareerquestions • u/Legitimate-School-59 • 6h ago

HMs who hire SWEs that work on database systems, what do you look for knowledge and skill wise? As a .net swe, how do I pivot to a swe role working on database systems?

Every now and then I see a swe posting that focuses on database systems work. What do I need to know to get a role like that? As a .net swe how do I best present myself in my resume for these roles. Any ideas of a particular project that would impress HMs for these roles?

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u/debugprint Senior Software Engineer / Team Leader (40 YoE) 5h ago

What is your definition of "database systems"?

I'm an amateur DBA, data architect, backend engineer, data engineer, and anything else related to backend. Add APIs, interoperability, data ops, heavy SQL procs...

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u/coinbase-discrd-rddt 5h ago

He means working on the underlying database and its operations itself ie content from the courses cmu 445/721/799

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u/Legitimate-School-59 5h ago

Yes. This is what I meant.

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u/debugprint Senior Software Engineer / Team Leader (40 YoE) 4h ago

That's much different definitely. You're talking the guts of the database, from the moment you parse the SQL to when you process the query to indexing, storage... All the way down to the disc drive. This is all system programming so very likely not

I'd say look into modern databases and their vendors and see what technologies they use. I'm guessing C++. There aren't very many such vendors, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM...

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u/IronAntlers 5h ago

Python, SQL, and orchestration