Software Engineer - Neki Orchestration

PlanetScale•San Francisco, CA

1d•$120,000 - $290,000•Remote

About The Position

PlanetScale is rapidly growing and reinventing the database space with its platform offering both PostgresQL and Vitess clusters. Vitess is an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enabling businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads without sacrificing developer experience. PlanetScale is extending this scaling power to PostgreSQL with Neki, their sharded PostgreSQL product, and is seeking Software Engineers to help orchestrate Neki. The role involves designing and building the control plane for provisioning, scaling, and healing Neki clusters with minimal customer-visible downtime. Responsibilities include building and maintaining high availability, disaster recovery, and data protection solutions, developing tooling and automation for database operations (backup, restore, migration), and participating in an on-call rotation. The role also involves direct customer interaction to understand needs and translate them into platform improvements.

Requirements

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 etc
Experience building and maintaining distributed, fault-tolerant services.
Working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized applications.
Experience building and operating distributed systems at scale.
Strong experience building, operating, or maintaining large-scale Postgres deployments in production.
An excellent understanding of low-level operating systems concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking, storage, and performance.
Strong fundamental computer science skills and can reason about distributed, fault-tolerant systems.
Thrive in a collaborative environment, enjoy mentoring other engineers, and communicate complex technical tradeoffs clearly.
Self-motivated and can work independently with minimal guidance while making sound technical decisions.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or operating a database-as-a-service or managed database platform.
Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and infrastructure-as-code.
Contributions to open-source projects, especially in the Postgres or database infrastructure space.
Experience working with remote, geographically distributed teams.
Previous experience at a high-growth technology company.

Responsibilities

Design and build the control plane that provisions, scales, and heals Neki clusters with minimal customer-visible downtime.
Build and maintain high availability, disaster recovery, and data protection solutions that keep customer databases safe through infrastructure failures.
Build tooling and automation for database operations, backup, restore, and migration workflows.
Participate in an on-call rotation.
Work directly with customers to understand their workloads and translate real-world needs into platform improvements.