Staff Platform Database Engineer
Chainguard3 hours ago
Base Salary
$205k - $231k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define the company-wide strategy and standards for database deployment, management, scaling, and operations.
- Inventory and assess database systems, identify risks, and create a roadmap for improving resiliency and reducing operational risk.
- Design and implement replication, high availability, backups, disaster recovery, migrations, capacity planning, and globally distributed database operations.
- Build production-grade database tooling, governance models, automation, and guardrails.
- Write production code supporting database deployment, management, and reliability.
- Design systems that account for global availability, latency, EU data residency, and data sovereignty requirements.
- Lead company-wide database infrastructure initiatives, author technical design documents, and establish scalable engineering standards.
- Partner with Dev Platform, SRE, Customer Engineering, and engineering teams to drive consistent database practices and architecture adoption.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience building and operating production database and platform infrastructure in modern cloud environments.
- Significant software, infrastructure, or platform engineering experience focused on database systems.
- Staff-level experience leading complex technical initiatives and influencing architecture across multiple engineering teams.
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating production database infrastructure.
- Strong PostgreSQL and MySQL experience.
- Hands-on experience with replication, high availability, backups and recovery, database migrations, capacity planning, and distributed databases across geographies.
- Experience operating highly available production database systems at scale.
- Experience designing and operating cloud database infrastructure with AWS and Google Cloud.
- Strong server-side Linux experience and proficiency programming in Go.
- Experience writing production code and building infrastructure tooling.
- Ability to evaluate systems, identify risk, and translate findings into an architecture and implementation roadmap.
- Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills.
- Experience applying AI or automation to database operations and infrastructure workflows.
- Preferred experience with database internals, Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools, stateful systems on Kubernetes, internal database platforms, governance, automated policy enforcement, and developer enablement.
Benefits
- Remote-first work culture with team meetups, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly coworking, phone, and internet stipend.
- Stock options upon hire and promotion, participation in secondary offerings, and 10 years to exercise options.
- 100% company-paid health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for employees and dependents.
- Flexible time off.
- 18 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.
Tech Stack
About Chainguard
Chainguard provides secure, hardened container images and production-ready builds of open source software for enterprises and developers, typically sold via subscriptions and support. Its offerings include Chainguard Images and tools for software supply chain security; the company also maintains Wolfi, a container-focused Linux distribution. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Kirkland, WA, Chainguard’s customers include organizations such as OpenAI, Snowflake, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.