Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.
Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake.
Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
Chainguard is scaling rapidly, and the database systems that support our products need to scale with us.
We’re looking for our first Staff Platform Database Engineer to help define how databases are deployed, managed, scaled, and operated across Chainguard. This is not a traditional DBA role focused primarily on query tuning or operating a single database. Instead, you’ll work across engineering teams to establish a consistent, resilient, and scalable approach to database infrastructure.
You’ll begin by understanding the current landscape: inventorying our database systems, identifying the highest-impact and highest-risk environments, and prioritizing opportunities to improve resiliency and reduce blast radius. From there, you’ll help shape the architecture, tooling, governance, documentation, and automated guardrails that will guide database operations across the company.
This is a highly hands-on Staff-level role. You’ll write production code, work directly with engineering teams, and lead company-wide technical initiatives while helping establish an opinionated database platform strategy for the future.
What you’ll do:- 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 and architectural leadership. Lead company-wide database infrastructure initiatives, author technical design documents, and establish scalable standards that ensure systems are reliable, secure, performant, and maintainable.
- Drive cross-functional database strategy. Partner with Dev Platform, SRE, Customer Engineering, and engineering teams to review architecture, solve database infrastructure challenges, and drive adoption of consistent best practices.
- 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.
- 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.
- Hands-on production experience with:
- 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.
Explore Our Work
Dive into the practical side of what we do at Chainguard. These resources provide a hands-on look at our processes and offer an opportunity for in-depth understanding of our product offerings and the technology behind them.
- Chainguard Academy
- https://www.chainguard.dev
We live and breathe our company values:
- We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
- We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
- We don't take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) — We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.
- We trust each other and assume good intentions — We're transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.
A few of the benefits we offer:
- 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.
- Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
- 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
- ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
- 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks 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.
If your experience is close but doesn't fulfill all requirements, please apply. We're building the best team in technology and are focused on hiring "Chainguardians" with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.
Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.
By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Chainguard will process your personal data in accordance with Chainguard's Global Candidate Privacy Notice.
©2026 Chainguard. All Rights Reserved.
Skills Required
- 8+ years building and operating production database and platform infrastructure in modern cloud environments
- Significant experience in software, infrastructure, or platform engineering focused 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
- Production experience with replication, high availability, backups and recovery, database migrations, capacity planning, and geographically distributed databases
- Experience operating globally available production database systems in high-scale environments
- Experience designing and operating database infrastructure in 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 create an architecture and implementation roadmap
- Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills
- 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
Chainguard Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Chainguard and has not been reviewed or approved by Chainguard.
-
Affordable Benefits — Health insurance is fully employer-paid for employees and dependents, materially reducing out-of-pocket costs. Public benefits materials consistently highlight this as a cornerstone of the package.
-
Parental & Family Support — Paid parental leave for all parents and meaningful family-planning support (including adoption, IVF, egg freezing, and surrogacy) are emphasized across company materials. These elements broaden support for different family paths and stages.
-
Equity Value & Accessibility — Stock options are granted at hire and promotion with a long post-termination exercise window, improving flexibility and potential value capture. This structure is presented as notably employee-friendly for a startup.
Chainguard Insights
What We Do
Chainguard is the secure foundation for building with open source software. The company's portfolio of secure, minimal container images helps organizations embrace a new culture of software development where starting left with security, not shifting left, is the reality. Chainguard was founded by the industry's leading experts on software supply chain security, open source, software, and cloud-native development. We aren't a traditional security vendor. It's container images provide secure-by-default infrastructure that introduces zero friction to developer workflows. That's why developers love and CISOS trust Chainguard. Its customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and leading technology and security companies, including Anduril, Canva, Domino Data Lab, Checkmarx, HPE, GitLab, Snowflake, and Wiz. Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia, and Spark Capital.
Why Work With Us
Security is our mission, but having fun is our mantra. Since our founding, we've increased +1M memes, sung 900+ hours of Kubernetes-themed karaoke, and created 774+ whacky Slack emojis. Beyond this, Chainguard's innovation and leadership in open source and software supply chain security has been recognized by industry leaders.
Gallery
.jpg)
