Staff Platform Database Engineer
Chainguard is hiring its first Staff Platform Database Engineer to define how databases are deployed, managed, scaled, and operated company-wide — a hands-on role writing production Go tooling, improving replication/HA/backup/disaster-recovery for PostgreSQL and MySQL systems across AWS and Google Cloud, and leading global-scale database infrastructure initiatives.
- Compensation
- $205K–$231K / yr
- Location
- United States - Remote
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Devops
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 8+ years building and operating production database and platform infrastructure in modern cloud environments
- Significant experience in software, infrastructure, 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, migrations, and capacity planning
- Experience with 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 roadmap
- Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills
- Experience applying AI or automation to database operations and infrastructure workflows
Nice to have
- 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
Full description
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.
Staff Platform Database Engineer
The role, in a nutshell:
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.