[Remote] Staff Platform Database Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Chainguard is hiring its first Staff Platform Database Engineer to define and build a consistent, resilient, scalable database platform across the company. The role combines hands-on production coding with database infrastructure strategy, reliability improvements, automation, and technical leadership across engineering teams.

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 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 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

Skills

• 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
• 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

Benefits

• 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.
• Receive stock options upon hire and promotion.
• You can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options.
• 100% coverage of health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents.
• ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need.
• 18 weeks paid parental leave 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.

Company Overview

Company H1B Sponsorship