Staff Platform Database Engineer

Postgres, MySQL
UNITED STATES
October 20, 2026
Full Time
Apply Now

Job Description

Company: Chainguard
Location: United States
Workplace Type: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $205,000—$231,000 USD

About the Role

Chainguard is the trusted source for open source, delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of open-source software. We are looking for our first Staff Platform Database Engineer to help define how databases are deployed, managed, scaled, and operated across Chainguard. This is a highly hands-on Staff-level role where you will write production code, work directly with engineering teams, and establish an opinionated database platform strategy for the future.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • 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 high-impact and high-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 and recovery, database 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.
  • Write production code: Contribute directly to the systems and tools that support database deployment, management, and reliability using Go.
  • Support global scale: Help design database systems that operate across regions and geographies while accounting for availability, latency, and compliance requirements.
  • Provide technical leadership: Lead company-wide database infrastructure initiatives, author architectural design docs, and partner across engineering teams to drive consistent practices.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • 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, and Capacity planning.
  • 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, with experience writing production code and building infrastructure tooling.
  • Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

  • 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.

Benefits & Perks (including)

  • 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.
  • Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion with participation in secondary offerings and 10 years to exercise options.
  • 100% Covered Health Insurance: 100% coverage of health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
  • Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need to recharge and reset.
  • 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.

Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

Related Jobs