Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Chainguard is hiring its first Staff Platform Database Engineer to define and build a consistent, resilient, scalable database platform across the company. The role combines hands-on production coding with database infrastructure strategy, reliability improvements, automation, and technical leadership across engineering teams.
Responsibilities
- 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
- Reduce operational risk. Improve database architecture and operating practices with the goal of driving database-related availability incidents toward zero
- Provide technical leadership. Lead a company-wide database infrastructure initiative — establishing scalable standards, authoring architectural design docs, and partnering across engineering teams to improve architecture and drive consistent practices
Skills
- 8+ years building and operating production database and platform infrastructure in modern cloud environments
- Significant experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, or platform engineering with a strong focus on database systems
- Staff-level experience leading complex technical initiatives and influencing architecture across multiple engineering teams
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating database infrastructure in production
- Strong PostgreSQL and MySQL experience
- Replication
- High availability
- Backups and recovery
- Database migrations
- Capacity planning
- Distributed databases operating across geographies
- Experience operating production database systems with global availability in high scale environments
- Experience designing and operating database infrastructure in cloud environments, including AWS and Google Cloud
- Strong server-side Linux experience
- Proficiency programming in Go
- Experience writing production code and building infrastructure tooling
- Ability to evaluate existing systems, identify risk, and translate findings into an opinionated architecture and implementation roadmap
- Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with the ability to guide engineering teams toward shared standards and practices
- Experience applying AI or automation to database operations and infrastructure workflows
- Deep knowledge of database internals
- Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tooling
- Experience running stateful systems on Kubernetes
- Experience building database platforms or self-service database infrastructure for internal engineering teams
- Experience with database governance, automated policy enforcement, and developer enablement
Benefits
- Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
- Receive stock options upon hire and promotion.
- You can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options.
- 100% coverage of health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
- ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need.
- 18 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.
Company Overview
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