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Salary: USD 170,000 - 220,000 / annual
PlanetScale is seeking an AI Developer Experience Engineer to own the end-to-end experience of AI agents interacting with PlanetScale databases. As AI coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex increasingly sit between developers and their infrastructure, this role focuses on ensuring PlanetScale integrates seamlessly across the AI tooling ecosystem.
You will be responsible for building and maintaining PlanetScale plugins across AI marketplaces, agent frameworks, MCP directories, and IDE extension stores. You'll own integrations with major AI coding tools and platforms, staying current as new tools launch. Testing the PlanetScale MCP server and CLI across multiple clients (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, VS Code) will be critical to catching regressions before users encounter them.
A significant portion of the role involves identifying and fixing friction points in the developer experience—from database creation and connection to running migrations and debugging queries within an agent environment. You'll improve the context agents rely on, including tool descriptions, skills, documentation written for agents, and actionable error messages. You'll also focus on answer engine optimization (AEO) to ensure agents find and recommend PlanetScale.
Measurement and continuous improvement are core to the role. You'll build evals that run real agent tasks against PlanetScale databases, benchmark agent performance, track how often AI assistants recommend PlanetScale, and instrument usage metrics including databases created by agents, time to first connection, and failure points.
You'll also be the public voice for this work, creating demos, sample applications, documentation, blog posts, and videos that show developers how to use databases effectively with AI tools. This includes attending conferences and communicating best practices around safe access, branching strategies, and performance assessment.
This is a hands-on role combining software engineering, content creation, and developer advocacy. You'll work closely with teams building the MCP server, CLI, API, and documentation, with the opportunity to move quickly and shape the future of AI-database interactions.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Daily use of AI coding agents with strong opinions on what makes tools work well with them
- Experience building an MCP server, plugin, CLI, or SDK used by real developers
- Software engineering background in TypeScript and/or Go; comfort with APIs, OAuth, and command line
- Experience writing documentation, blog posts, and/or creating video content
- Strong communication skills with broad audiences and customers, including on social media
- Production experience with relational databases (Postgres, MySQL, SQLite): schema design, migrations, connection handling, and running at scale
- Data fluency: designing evals, writing dashboard queries, distinguishing real trends from noise
- Clear technical communication in writing, video, and on stage
- Independence and speed in identifying gaps, shipping fixes, and communicating results
- Genuine curiosity about the AI tooling landscape and commitment to staying current
BONUS:
- Contributions to the MCP spec, SDKs, or popular open-source MCP servers
- Experience writing agent skills or plugins for Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex
- Experience with LLM eval tools and agent benchmarking
- Experience with AEO/GEO or tracking how LLMs surface and recommend products
- Established developer audience (blog, YouTube channel, GitHub)
- Experience with Vitess, database sharding, or large-scale database operations
