Software Engineer - Neki Orchestration

PlanetScale; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

PlanetScale is seeking a Software Engineer to work on Neki, a cloud-native solution for database management. Your role will involve designing and building control planes, ensuring high availability, and collaborating with customers to understand their needs. The ideal candidate will have over 5 years of experience in software engineering, particularly in distributed systems, and be proficient in Go.

This position offers a competitive salary range of $120,000 - $290,000 USD and is aimed at individuals looking to thrive in a diverse, equitable environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience designing, building, and supporting large‑scale systems in production.
• Strong proficiency in Go, with experience in other languages like Ruby, Python, etc.
• Experience building and maintaining distributed, fault‑tolerant services.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the control plane for Neki clusters.
• Build and maintain high availability and disaster recovery solutions.
• Work directly with customers to understand workloads.

Skills

Software engineering experience

Go programming

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Containerized applications

Job description

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. The PlanetScale platform offers both PostgresQL and Vitess clusters. Vitess is an open‑source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enabling businesses to efficiently handle large‑scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience. We’re bringing the same scaling power to PostgreSQL with Neki, our sharded PostgreSQL product, and we’re looking for Software Engineers to help orchestrate Neki.

Our customers entrust us with their most precious digital asset, their data, so the stakes couldn’t be higher. We’re looking for a Software Engineer to join our Neki team to bring Neki to the cloud.

What’s the job to be done?

• You will design and build the control plane that provisions, scales, and heals Neki clusters with minimal customer‑visible downtime.
• You will build and maintain high availability, disaster recovery, and data protection solutions that keep customer databases safe through infrastructure failures.
• You will build tooling and automation for database operations, backup, restore, and migration workflows — and participate in an on‑call rotation.
• You will work directly with customers to understand their workloads and translate real‑world needs into platform improvements.
• You have strong experience building, operating, or maintaining large‑scale Postgres deployments in production.
• You have an excellent understanding of low‑level operating systems concepts including multithreading, memory management, networking, storage, and performance.
• You have strong fundamental computer science skills and can reason about distributed, fault‑tolerant systems.
• You thrive in a collaborative environment, enjoy mentoring other engineers, and communicate complex technical tradeoffs clearly.
• You are self‑motivated and can work independently with minimal guidance while making sound technical decisions.

What you will need

• 5+ years of software engineering experience designing, building, and supporting large‑scale systems in production.
• Strong proficiency in Go, with experience in other languages like Ruby, Python, etc.
• Experience building and maintaining distributed, fault‑tolerant services.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized applications.
• Experience building and operating distributed systems at scale.

What else will help you be successful

• Experience building or operating a database‑as‑a‑service or managed database platform.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and infrastructure‑as‑code.
• Contributions to open‑source projects, especially in the Postgres or database infrastructure space.
• Experience working with remote, geographically distributed teams.
• Previous experience at a high‑growth technology company.

Why PlanetScale

We’re redefining how high‑growth companies manage data at scale—and we work with some of the most exciting brands in gaming, consumer tech, and B2B SaaS. As a Software Engineer, you’ll be at the core of building the platform that powers world‑class apps used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. PlanetScale is a profitable company with a philosophy centered around building small teams of P99 individuals and is recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in America.

At PlanetScale we believe in supporting people to do their best work and thrive no matter the location. Our mission is to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive company. We strive to build an inclusive environment where all people feel that they are equally respected and valued, whether they are a candidate or an employee. We welcome applicants of any educational background, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, citizenship, socioeconomic status, disability, pregnancy status, and veteran status.

If you have a disability, please let us know if there’s any way we can make the interview process better for you; we’re happy to accommodate!

Total Compensation and Pay Transparency

An employee’s total compensation consists of base salary + variable comp where appropriate + benefits + equity. A member of our Talent Acquisition team will be happy to answer any further questions when we engage with you to begin the interview process.

Base salary range: $120,000 - $290,000 USD