PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. The PlanetScale platform offers both Postgres and Vitess clusters. Vitess, an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enables businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience.
PlanetScale is seeking an engineer to join our Insights team to help build our customer facing database observability product. Insights helps developers understand their database performance and provides visibility into query patterns, performance metrics and database health across both Vitess/MySQL and PostgreSQL systems.
- Instrument Vitess, MySQL and PostgreSQL to emit performance data
- Design, implement and maintain our data collection pipeline
- Create intuitive dashboards and visualizations that surface actionable database insights
- Develop APIs and integrations that expose insights data to customers
- Collaborate with other teams to define the next generation of database observability features
- Build tools for query analysis, performance profiling, and anomaly detection
- Own features end-to-end, from initial design through production deployment and monitoring
- Partner with customers and support teams to understand real-world observability challenges
Required:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience
- Experience building observability, monitoring, or telemetry products (APM, logs, metrics, traces, etc.)
- Experience with distributed systems and data pipelines
- Proficiency with time-series data and aggregation patterns
- Backend development experience (Go, Rust, Ruby, Python, or similar)
- Comfort working across the full stack and switching between different technical domains
- Ability to work in a self-directed environment
Nice to Have:
- Knowledge of ClickHouse, Prometheus, or other time-series databases
- Familiarity with streaming data systems (Kafka)
- Background in database internals or query optimization
- Experience with MySQL, PostgreSQL or Vitess
You're someone who deeply understands the challenges developers face when debugging database performance issues. You've built observability tooling before and have strong opinions about what makes telemetry data useful versus overwhelming.
You enjoy wearing many hats and get energized by working on diverse problems across the stack. You ship quickly and iterate based on feedback. You collaborate effectively with engineers in different domains. You're excited about leveraging AI tools to move faster. You make pragmatic technical decisions and can work independently with minimal direction.
Why PlanetScaleWe're redefining how high-growth companies manage data at scale—and we work with some of the most exciting brands in gaming, consumer tech, and B2B SaaS. As a Software Engineer, you'll be at the core of building the platform that powers world-class apps used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. PlanetScale is a profitable company with a philosophy centered around building small teams of p99 individuals and is recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in America.
At PlanetScale we believe in supporting people to do their best work and thrive no matter the location. Our mission is to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive company. We strive to build an inclusive environment where all people feel that they are equally respected and valued, whether they are a candidate or an employee. We welcome applicants of any educational background, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, citizenship, socioeconomic status, disability, pregnancy status, and veteran status.
If you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!
Total Compensation and Pay TransparencyAn employee's total compensation consists of base salary + variable comp where appropriate + benefits + equity. A member of our Talent Acquisition team will be happy to answer any further questions when we engage with you to begin the interview process.
Base salary range: $120,000 - $290,000 USD
Skills Required
- 5+ years of software engineering experience
- Experience building observability, monitoring, or telemetry products
- Experience with distributed systems and data pipelines
- Proficiency with time-series data and aggregation patterns
- Backend development experience with Go, Rust, Ruby, Python
- Comfort working across the full stack
- Ability to work in a self-directed environment
What We Do
Our Postgres and Vitess databases deliver exceptional speed and reliability, with Vitess adding ultra scalability through horizontal sharding. Our blazing fast NVMe drives unlock unlimited IOPS, bringing data center performance to the cloud. We offer a range of deployment options to cover all of your security and compliance requirements — including bring your own cloud with PlanetScale Managed. PlanetScale powers Tier 0 databases at companies like Slack, block, Etsy, intercom, Cursor, MyFitnessPal, and Barstool Sports. Our Offerings Vitess allows MySQL databases to scale horizontally through explicit sharding — enabling a shared nothing architecture distributing data across thousands of nodes, all routed through a single database connection. PlanetScale Postgres starts at $5 per month and gives you a fully managed PostgreSQL cluster built for performance and reliability, offering first-class tooling without sacrificing developer experience. Available in AWS and GCP. High availability clusters deliver automatic failover across three availability zones. Neki is our next-generation Postgres sharding architecture inspired by everything we have learned building Vitess: a fresh design from first principles to bring massive scale and reliability to PostgreSQL workloads.
Why Work With Us
Our philosophy is to attract the best talent and to support them doing amazing things where they are the most comfortable and productive. We have a highly distributed, remote forward team with employees across the United States and the globe.
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