Software Engineer – PlanetScale Postgres (Remote)

Job Overview

As a Software Engineer on the Postgres team, you will design and build core infrastructure for PlanetScale’s managed Postgres offering, including provisioning, scaling, failover, backup, restore, migration, observability, and reliability workflows.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build the control plane responsible for provisioning, scaling, and healing Postgres clusters.
• Minimize customer-visible downtime during infrastructure changes and failures.
• Build and maintain high-availability, disaster-recovery, and data-protection capabilities.
• Tune Postgres for large and demanding production workloads.
• Develop tooling and automation for database operations, backup, restore, and migration workflows.
• Participate in an on-call rotation.
• Work directly with customers to understand production workloads and translate those needs into platform improvements.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience designing, building, and supporting large-scale systems in production.
• Strong experience building, operating, or maintaining large-scale Postgres deployments.
• Strong proficiency in Go.
• Experience with additional languages such as Ruby, Python, Zig, or Rust.
• Experience building and maintaining distributed, fault-tolerant services.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized applications.
• Experience operating distributed systems at scale.
• Strong understanding of low-level operating systems concepts including multithreading, memory management, networking, storage, and performance.
• Strong computer science fundamentals and ability to reason about distributed and fault-tolerant systems.
• Ability to communicate complex technical tradeoffs clearly.
• Ability to work independently with minimal guidance and make sound technical decisions.
• Collaborative working style and willingness to mentor other engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or operating a database-as-a-service or managed database platform.
• Experience with Postgres connection pooling and proxy layers.
• Experience with cloud platforms including AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code.
• Contributions to open-source projects, particularly within Postgres or database infrastructure.
• Experience working with remote, geographically distributed teams.
• Previous experience at a high-growth technology company.

Technical Focus

• PostgreSQL
• Go
• Distributed systems
• Fault-tolerant services
• Kubernetes
• Containerized applications
• Database control planes
• High availability
• Disaster recovery
• Backup and restore
• Database migration
• Cloud infrastructure
• Infrastructure as code

Platform Reliability & Database Operations

The role is responsible for systems that keep Postgres clusters available through infrastructure failures while supporting provisioning, scaling, replication, failover, backup, restore, and migration workflows.

Engineers are also expected to investigate performance at both the database and systems level and help maintain reliable service for demanding production workloads.

Customer Collaboration

The Software Engineer will work directly with PlanetScale customers to understand how they use Postgres in production. These real-world workload requirements will inform improvements to the managed database platform.

Compensation

The stated base salary range for this position is $120,000–$290,000 USD per year.

PlanetScale states that employee total compensation consists of base salary, variable compensation where appropriate, benefits, and equity. The supplied listing does not specify the value or structure of any variable compensation, benefits, or equity for this particular position.

Remote Work

This position is explicitly listed as Remote. PlanetScale states that it supports employees in doing their best work regardless of location.

The supplied listing does not specify eligible countries, states, required time zones, or work-authorization requirements.