Staff Platform Database Engineer

About the role

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.

Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake.

Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.

The role, in a nutshell:

Chainguard is scaling rapidly, and the database systems that support our products need to scale with us.

We’re looking for our first Staff Platform Database Engineer to help define how databases are deployed, managed, scaled, and operated across Chainguard. This is not a traditional DBA role focused primarily on query tuning or operating a single database. Instead, you’ll work across engineering teams to establish a consistent, resilient, and scalable approach to database infrastructure.

You’ll begin by understanding the current landscape: inventorying our database systems, identifying the highest-impact and highest-risk environments, and prioritizing opportunities to improve resiliency and reduce blast radius. From there, you’ll help shape the architecture, tooling, governance, documentation, and automated guardrails that will guide database operations across the company.

This is a highly hands-on Staff-level role. You’ll write production code, work directly with engineering teams, and lead company-wide technical initiatives while helping establish an opinionated database platform strategy for the future.

What you’ll do:

- Define database platform strategy. Establish how databases should be deployed, managed, scaled, and operated across Chainguard, with a focus on consistency, resiliency, performance, and global availability.

- Assess and prioritize the current environment. Build an inventory of existing database systems, identify the highest-impact and highest-risk environments, and develop a roadmap for improving resiliency and reducing operational risk.

- Improve resiliency and availability. Design and implement approaches for replication, high availability, backups, disaster recovery, migrations, and capacity planning across globally distributed systems.

- Build tooling and automation. Develop production-grade tooling, governance models, and automated guardrails that make the right database practices easy to adopt and difficult to bypass.

- Write production code. Contribute directly to the systems and tools that support database deployment, management, and reliability.

- Support global scale. Help design database systems that can operate across regions and geographies while accounting for availability, latency, EU data residency, and sovereignty requirements.