Location: San Francisco Bay Area or Remote
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.
PlanetScale is seeking an engineer to join our Insights team, which builds our database observability tooling. Insights helps developers understand their database performance and provides visibility into query patterns, performance metrics and database health across both Vitess/MySQL and PostgreSQL systems.
- Instrument Vitess, MySQL and PostgreSQL to emit performance data
- Design, implement and maintain our data collection pipeline
- Create intuitive dashboards and visualizations that surface actionable database insights
- Develop APIs and integrations that expose insights data to customers
- Collaborate with other teams to define the next generation of database observability features
- Build tools for query analysis, performance profiling, and anomaly detection
- Own features end-to-end, from initial design through production deployment and monitoring
- Partner with customers and support teams to understand real-world observability challenges
Required:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience
- Experience building observability, monitoring, or telemetry products (APM, logs, metrics, traces, etc.)
- Experience with distributed systems and data pipelines
- Proficiency with time-series data and aggregation patterns
- Backend development experience (Go, Rust, Ruby, Python, or similar)
- Comfort working across the full stack and switching between different technical domains
- Ability to work in a self-directed environment
Nice to Have:
- Knowledge of ClickHouse, Prometheus, or other time-series databases
- Familiarity with streaming data systems (Kafka)
- Background in database internals or query optimization
- Experience with MySQL, PostgreSQL or Vitess
You're someone who deeply understands the challenges developers face when debugging database performance issues. You've built observability tooling before and have strong opinions about what makes telemetry data useful versus overwhelming.
You enjoy wearing many hats and get energized by working on diverse problems across the stack. You ship quickly and iterate based on feedback. You collaborate effectively with engineers in different domains. You're excited about leveraging AI tools to move faster. You make pragmatic technical decisions and can work independently with minimal direction.