Enterprise Support Engineer

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. The PlanetScale platform offers both Postgres and Vitess clusters. Vitess, an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enables businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience.

Our customers entrust us with what is often their most precious digital asset, their data, so the stakes couldn't be higher. We're looking for a Software Engineer to join our core engineering team and help us build the next generation of database infrastructure.

What's the job to be done?

• You will advise and handle support requests from enterprise customers on the PlanetScale platform.
• You will become a customer-facing subject-matter expert for enterprise customers on the PlanetScale platform.
• You will identify product gaps in a customer-specific context and work with Technical Account Management, Engineering and Sales Engineering teams to prioritize and escalate them.
• You will be part of an on call rotation for high priority issues.

These attributes best describe you…

• You are comfortable in front of customers, empathetic but understanding when to push back to help customers become successful on their own.
• You have excellent debugging and troubleshooting skills; with a mix of enough experience and intuition to zero in on root-causes for bugs that can leave others stumped.
• You are comfortable stepping outside your comfort zone. Be it delving into unfamiliar code in Vitess, one of its dependencies, or a random MySQL connector, written in a language you may not know (yet!). Working with code as your main source of documentation doesn't fluster you, and you are happy to help add/correct it as necessary where it may be inaccurate.
• You can operate independently, but you know when you are in too deep and need to ask for help.
• You know how to work under pressure in times of urgency. We and our customers both take issues with their data platform seriously.

What you will need

• Experience supporting production databases and applications, preferably at scale.
• Experience with database internals and peformance tuning, specifically for PostgreSQL and MySQL databases
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes.
• Strong ability to communicate and deal directly with customers, whether in email, Slack, video conference, or in person.

What else will help you be successful

• Knowledge of common application deployment platforms and frameworks. Eg Python, Go, Node, PHP
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Knowledge of monitoring, observability, and debugging tools
• Contributions to open-source projects, especially in the database or infrastructure space

Total Compensation and Pay Transparency

Salary range: US $120,000 - $200,000