Software Engineer - PlanetScale Postgres

Role Description

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. The PlanetScale platform delivers a fully managed, multi-cloud Postgres service designed for the most demanding production workloads. We handle the complexity of provisioning, scaling, replication, and failover - so engineering teams can focus on building their products.

We're looking for a Software Engineer to join our Postgres engineering team and help us build a world-class managed Postgres offering.

What's the job to be done?

• You will design and build the control plane that provisions, scales, and heals Postgres clusters with minimal customer-visible downtime.
• You will build and maintain high availability, disaster recovery, and data protection solutions that keep customer databases safe through infrastructure failures.
• You will tune Postgres to operate at scale for some of the largest and most demanding workloads in the world.
• You will build tooling and automation for database operations, backup, restore, and migration workflows - and participate in an on-call rotation.
• You will work directly with customers to understand their workloads and translate real-world needs into platform improvements.

Qualifications

• You have strong experience building, operating, or maintaining large-scale Postgres deployments in production.
• You have an excellent understanding of low-level operating systems concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking, storage, and performance.
• You have strong fundamental computer science skills and can reason about distributed, fault-tolerant systems.
• You thrive in a collaborative environment, enjoy mentoring other engineers, and communicate complex technical tradeoffs clearly.
• You are self-motivated and can work independently with minimal guidance while making sound technical decisions.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience designing, building, and supporting large-scale systems in production.
• Strong proficiency in Go, with experience in other languages like Ruby, Python, Zig or Rust.
• Experience building and maintaining distributed, fault-tolerant services.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized applications.
• Experience building and operating distributed systems at scale.

Benefits

• 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.
• We believe in supporting people to do their best work and thrive no matter the location.
• 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.
• 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!

Company Description

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 - $290,000 USD