Software Engineer - Internal Tools

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. The PlanetScale platform offers both PostgreSQL and Vitess clusters. Vitess is an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL that enables businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience. We're bringing the same scaling power to PostgreSQL with Neki, our sharded PostgreSQL product.

We're hiring a software engineer to build the internal tools that run PlanetScale. You'll automate the manual work that slows a growing company down: incident response, on-call, support workflows, onboarding, and the dozens of other small things that take up our time.

Location

This role is in-office only at our San Francisco headquarters. You must already live in the SF Bay Area and be able to work from the office most days.

This is not a remote role. We do not offer relocation. We do not sponsor visas.

If you need to relocate, work remotely, or need visa sponsorship, please do not apply.

What You'll Do

• Build AI-enabled tools and agents that automate manual work across engineering, support, and operations
• Write bots and integrations for Slack, PagerDuty, and the other systems we run the business on
• Build internal dashboards that give the team visibility into what's actually happening
• Integrate LLM APIs and AI coding tools directly into the internal systems you build
• Ship small, useful things fast. Iterate based on what people need
• Work directly with senior engineers and leadership to find friction and fix it
• Own your projects end to end: design, build, ship, support

For example, you might:

• Automate our incident response process
• Build automations for customer support
• Build internal dashboards that measure our service quality

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 0-2 years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent project or internship work
• Solid fundamentals in at least one of TypeScript, Ruby, or Go
• Comfortable building with AI coding tools and LLM APIs. This role is AI-enabled work, not just AI-assisted
• Comfort writing scripts, small services, or automations that solve a real problem
• Clear written communication
• Already based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We do not relocate for this role.
• In-office at our San Francisco headquarters most days. This is not remote.
• Authorized to work in the US without sponsorship. We cannot sponsor visas.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with Slack's API, GitHub Actions, or similar automation platforms
• Exposure to Terraform or Kubernetes
• A side project, bot, or tool you built to automate something in your own life

About You

You fix the annoying thing to save time. You'd rather ship something small this week than plan something big for next quarter. You ask good questions, take feedback well, and want to learn from engineers more senior than you. You want to be in the room with your team, not on a call. You're excited about AI tools not just to write code faster, but to design and ship whole systems.

Why PlanetScale

We're redefining how high-growth companies manage data at scale—and we work with some of the most exciting brands in gaming, consumer tech, and B2B SaaS. As a Software Engineer, you'll be at the core of building the platform that powers world-class apps used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. PlanetScale is a profitable company with a philosophy centered around building small teams of p99 individuals and is recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in America.

At PlanetScale we believe in supporting people to do their best work. Our mission is to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive company. We strive to build an inclusive environment where all people feel that they are equally respected and valued, whether they are a candidate or an employee. We welcome applicants of any educational background, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, citizenship, socioeconomic status, disability, pregnancy status, and veteran status.

If you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!

Total Compensation and Pay Transparency

An employee's total compensation consists of base salary + variable comp where appropriate + benefits + equity. A member of our Talent Acquisition team will be happy to answer any further questions when we engage with you to begin the interview process.

Base salary range: $120,000 - $160,000 USD