Staff Platform Database Engineer

Chainguard; Northern (KY); Remote; 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 the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.

Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake.

Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.

The role, in a nutshell:

Chainguard is scaling rapidly, and the database systems that support our products need to scale with us.

We’re looking for our first Staff Platform Database Engineer to help define how databases are deployed, managed, scaled, and operated across Chainguard. This is not a traditional DBA role focused primarily on query tuning or operating a single database. Instead, you’ll work across engineering teams to establish a consistent, resilient, and scalable approach to database infrastructure.

You’ll begin by understanding the current landscape: inventorying our database systems, identifying the highest-impact and highest-risk environments, and prioritizing opportunities to improve resiliency and reduce blast radius. From there, you’ll help shape the architecture, tooling, governance, documentation, and automated guardrails that will guide database operations across the company.

This is a highly hands-on Staff-level role. You’ll write production code, work directly with engineering teams, and lead company-wide technical initiatives while helping establish an opinionated database platform strategy for the future.

What you’ll do:

• 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 and architectural leadership. Lead company-wide database infrastructure initiatives, author technical design documents, and establish scalable standards that ensure systems are reliable, secure, performant, and maintainable.
• Drive cross-functional database strategy. Partner with Dev Platform, SRE, Customer Engineering, and engineering teams to review architecture, solve database infrastructure challenges, and drive adoption of consistent best practices.
• 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.

What we're looking for:

• 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 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.
• 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.

Nice to haves

• Deep knowledge of database internals.
• Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Experience building database platforms or self-service database infrastructure for internal engineering teams.
• Experience with database governance, automated policy enforcement, and developer enablement.

Explore Our Work

Dive into the practical side of what we do at Chainguard. These resources provide a hands‑on look at our processes and offer an opportunity for in‑depth understanding of our product offerings and the technology behind them.

• We are customer obsessed — We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.
• We have a bias for intentional action — We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.
• We don't take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) — We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.
• We trust each other and assume good intentions — We're transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.

A few of the benefits we offer:

• 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.
• Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
• Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
• 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks 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.

If your experience is close but doesn't fulfill all requirements, please apply. We're building the best team in technology and are focused on hiring "Chainguardians" with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.

Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in Chainguard’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.