Software Engineer - Postgres Internals

PlanetScale•San Francisco, CA

5d•$120,000 - $290,000

About The Position

As a PostgreSQL Core Engineer, you will spend most of your time contributing upstream to the PostgreSQL core engine and maintaining the Postgres extensions — both open-source community projects and Planetscale's proprietary extensions — that power our Postgres offering.

Requirements

Strong C programming skills in large, established codebases.
Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals: MVCC, query planner/executor, WAL, vacuum, replication, memory contexts.
Demonstrated open-source contributions to PostgreSQL or comparable database projects (accepted patches, reviews, or extensions).
Fluency with Git and the PostgreSQL patch workflow.
Comfortable in Linux/BSD development environments; able to profile and benchmark database workloads.

Nice To Haves

PostgreSQL contribution history.
Experience authoring or maintaining a Postgres extension end-to-end (e.g., pgvector, pg_stat_statements, PostGIS).
Background in distributed systems, storage engines, or query optimization.
Public talks, papers, or blog posts in the Postgres ecosystem.

Responsibilities

Author and review patches to the PostgreSQL core engine: performance, features, bug fixes, and security — landed through the pgsql-hackers mailing list and the Commitfest process.
Maintain Postgres extensions, both open-source (community projects we depend on) and proprietary (Planetscale-owned). Includes feature work, bug fixes, performance tuning, and major-version compatibility.
Review community patches with rigor on correctness, stability, and PostgreSQL coding conventions.
Engage the PostgreSQL community in design discussions, the 5 (five) annual Commitfests, and conferences.
Root-cause Postgres issues affecting Planetscale customers and turn fixes into upstream patches when applicable.
Improve documentation for PostgreSQL and our extensions as part of every change.