Senior Engineer – Core MySQL, Database Platform

Bazeta; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Shopify is looking for a Senior Engineer to join the Core MySQL, Database Platform team. You will build and maintain software to operate MySQL at massive scale, manage fleet operations, and own backups and failover systems.

You’ll work on critical changes with a strong emphasis on correctness and resiliency, while contributing to on-call reliability. The role blends software engineering with operational responsibilities, requiring production ownership, strong debugging skills, and comfort with

Qualifications

• Hands-on ownership of stateful, large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven software engineering ability with real code, not just scripts.
• Experience operating critical infrastructure and on-call rotations.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (GCP) and distributed tooling.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain custom software to operate MySQL at Shopify scale.
• Directly operate the fleet: VM management, configuration, and performance tuning.
• Own software powering connection management, backups, and failover.
• Plan and execute changes where correctness matters more than speed.

Skills

Large-scale distributed systems

Software engineering

On-call experience

AI tooling usage

Tools

GCP

Zookeeper

MySQL internals

Job description

# Senior Engineer – Core MySQL, Database PlatformUnited States1 hour agoID 4918781Price on request## DetailsEmployment type: Full-timeRemote: YesCompany: Shopify## DescriptionAt Shopify, the Database Platform group owns the data layer that every shop on the platform runs on. The Core MySQL team sits at the centre of that: we own MySQL itself along with everything around it, the backup systems, the routing layer, the proxies and the regional resiliency and failover machinery that decides how Shopify runs across regions and where traffic goes. These are critical services in the most literal sense. This is a role for someone who is interested in solving hard problems at world class scale. This role has equal parts software engineering and operational level work. You’ll be building and maintaining purpose built software to operate our database fleet as well as implementing performance, cost and resiliency improvements. What you’ll be doing • Building and maintaining custom software and automation that lets the team operate MySQL at Shopify’s scale • Operating the fleet directly: virtual machine management, configuration and performance tuning for MySQL, capacity work, and resiliency testing. • Owning the software powering the connection management, the backups and the failover machinery behind Shopify’s database platform. • Planning and executing changes to critical systems where correctness matters more than speed, and being the person who thought through what could go wrong. • Participating in a shared on-call rotation covering Shopify’s database platform • Growing with the platform as the data layer evolves. Qualifications • Solid grounding in infrastructure and large-scale distributed systems, with real production ownership rather than adjacent exposure. • Genuine software engineering ability: you write and maintain real code, not just scripts, and you will be assessed against Shopify’s engineering bar. • Hands-on operational experience with stateful systems: configuration and performance tuning, capacity planning, failure testing, and incident response. • Exceptional attention to detail and a demonstrated instinct for de-risking changes to systems where failure is expensive. • Comfort carrying a pager for critical infrastructure, and the judgement to know when to act and when to escalate. • Effective use of AI tooling to accelerate your own work and cover gaps. Bonus points • Deep MySQL experience: the internals, replication, backup and restore, proxying and routing layers. • Experience with Zookeeper or other similar distributed systems • Experience with Google Cloud Platform • Experience operating a large database fleet at a company of similar scale. At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly, not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you’re ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a live pair programming session, come prepared with your own IDE. This role requires on-call work. Ready to build the backbone of Shopify? Join the team that’s making commerce better for everyone. Infrastructure engineering at Shopify Infrastructure Engineers at Shopify build and maintain the systems that handle millions of requests per second and billions of dollars in transactions. At that scale, performance gains matter and weak assumptions surface quickly. Your systems power the experience for millions of entrepreneurs and buyers every minute of every day, including peak events like Black Friday. Engineers at Shopify spend the majority of their time actually writing code to build and improve infrastructure. You’ll solve problems that don’t exist anywhere else, with challenges that push what’s possible. Source: Jobspresso (https://jobspresso.co/job/senior-engineer-core-mysql-database-platform/)This listing comes from a partner feed. Apply on the source website.