Senior Platform Database Engineer

Chainguard; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-First Culture

Stock options

Health Insurance

Flexible Time Off

18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave

Job summary

Chainguard is scaling rapidly and seeks a Staff Platform Database Engineer to define how databases are deployed, managed, scaled, and operated across Chainguard. This is not a traditional DBA role; you’ll work across engineering teams to establish a consistent, resilient, and scalable database platform.

You’ll begin by inventorying our current landscape, identifying the highest-impact environments, and prioritizing opportunities to improve resiliency and reduce blast radius.

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, capacity planning, distributed databases 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.
• 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; able to guide engineering teams toward shared standards and practices.
• Experience applying AI or automation to database operations and infrastructure workflows.

Responsibilities

• Define database platform strategy and establish deployment, management, scaling, and operation standards across Chainguard.
• Inventory existing database systems and identify highest-impact, highest-risk environments; create a roadmap for resiliency.
• Improve resiliency and availability with replication, backups, DR, migrations, and capacity planning across global systems.
• Build production-grade tooling, governance models, and automated guardrails for easy adoption of best practices.
• Write production code and contribute to systems that support database deployment, management, and reliability.
• Support global scale by designing for multi-region operation, latency, data residency, and sovereignty requirements.
• Reduce operational risk by improving architecture and operating practices toward zero incidents.
• Provide technical leadership through design docs and scalable standards for reliability, security, and performance.
• Lead cross-functional database strategy with Dev Platform, SRE, Customer Engineering, and other teams; promote best practices.
• Drive company-wide database infrastructure initiatives and adoption of consistent standards across engineering.

Skills

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Go

Database architecture

Cloud (AWS, GCP)

Automation tooling

Team leadership

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Chainguard is scaling rapidly and seeks a Staff Platform Database Engineer to define how databases are deployed, managed, scaled, and operated across Chainguard. This is not a traditional DBA role; you’ll work across engineering teams to establish a consistent, resilient, and scalable database platform.

You’ll begin by inventorying our current landscape, identifying the highest-impact environments, and prioritizing opportunities to improve resiliency and reduce blast radius.