Software Engineer - PlanetScale Postgres

About the role

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.

Our customers entrust us with their most precious digital asset, their data, so the stakes couldn't be higher. 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.

These attributes best describe you…

- 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.

What you will need

- 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.

What else will help you be successful

- Experience building or operating a database-as-a-service or managed database platform.

- Experience with connection pooling and proxy layers for Postgres.

- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and infrastructure-as-code.

- Contributions to open-source projects, especially in the Postgres or database infrastructure space.