We're hiring C++ engineers. You don't have to know anything about database internals, but you do have to know C or C++ well and understand all the standard software engineering stuff. (I didn't list this position because it's a less hair on fire sort of thing). Please e-mail me -- [email protected].

As far as getting started on the codebase, we unfortunately don't have a guide/mentorship program yet for hacking on the internals. The best way is probably to pick a really simple bug and try to fix it. I'll see if we can work on making getting started with core contributions easier.