We hit similar problems with Core Data for http://clothapp.com and ended up migrating to Realm (http://realm.io) last month. Been pretty happy with it so far.
Hey -- CEO of DTS here. Quick word on the tech -- it was basically a clone of Google F1, with full ANSI SQL support. It was damn fast and could handle tens of thousands of connections on a modest cluster. Way more than Salesforce's Phoenix, which was a small subset of SQL and focused on analytics.
We're building Spire, a database for real-time big data. We're building a SQL engine, fulltext search, and more on top of HBase. It's incredibly fun because we get to build a database from scratch, and we get to do some really cool stuff with distributed systems.
We’re obsessed with building pragmatic things that work in “the real world” and joining them with the most cutting-edge distributed systems research. We’ve built and run some of the largest companies and infrastructures: Sun, Amazon, Google, Intel, and more. Even the CEO codes almost every day.
Engineer: Database Core / Distributed Systems: San Francisco
Help our core team build a database from the ground up. Finally, you can do things “the way they should be”. Instead of a db from the 1980′s, we’re creating a platform for modern, real-time applications.
Here are some things you may enjoy doing or learning about:
-Building query planners and optimizers
-Compiler design
-Functional programming (Scala, Clojure, etc.)
-Distributed systems architecture: failover, replication
-JVM tuning and performance hacks
-Turning academic research into reality
-Resilient systems for the real world
-Engineer: Operations and Automation: San Francisco
Yes, this is a “DevOps” role. If you like coding and systems work, you’re going to enjoy this. You’ll be the one responsible for building clusters that heal themselves and deploy seamlessly in the cloud or customer sites.
-Cluster automation
-Deployment frameworks like Chef, Puppet, CFEngine
-Building monitoring tools that you enjoy using
-Upgrading and recovering from failure with no downtime
-How to make Linux behave
-Hadoop/HBase/BigTable/other distributed systems
-And perhaps a bit of UX hackin’
FYI: Heroku is fantastic for scaling apps. But if it's your database that's the bottleneck...you've got problems. Because your options with SQL are scaling up or sharding, each quite painful. If you want any advice, ping me.
We're a distributed database startup in Seattle, WA. We make a database that can handle queries and fulltext searches on "Big Data". It's an elegant architecture, and a lot of fun to work on.
We're about to be in a position to hire a few folks:
1. Distributed systems hackers
2. Infrastructure automation engineers (think Chef, Google SREs)
3. Customer Development fans (think Steve Blank's book).
Check out our very spartan webpage at drawntoscale.com, and drop us a line there if you're interested.
Foo Camp was fantastic both years I went, and the O’Reilly crew has worked hard to make things better. We still have a lot of work to do.