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Salary: USD 205,000 - 231,000 / annual
Chainguard is seeking a Staff Platform Database Engineer to define and establish how databases are deployed, managed, scaled, and operated across the company. This is the company's first Staff-level database infrastructure role, positioned to shape database strategy as Chainguard scales rapidly.
You will begin by assessing the current database landscape: inventorying existing systems, identifying high-impact and high-risk environments, and prioritizing opportunities to improve resiliency and reduce operational blast radius. From this foundation, you'll help establish architecture, tooling, governance, documentation, and automated guardrails that guide database operations company-wide.
This is a highly hands-on Staff-level position. You will write production code, work directly with engineering teams across Dev Platform, SRE, Customer Engineering, and product engineering, and lead company-wide technical initiatives. Key responsibilities include:
- Define database platform strategy focused on consistency, resiliency, performance, and global availability
- Design and implement approaches for replication, high availability, backups, disaster recovery, migrations, and capacity planning across globally distributed systems
- Build production-grade tooling, governance models, and automated guardrails that make correct database practices easy to adopt
- Contribute directly to systems and tools supporting database deployment, management, and reliability
- Design database systems operating across regions while accounting for availability, latency, EU data residency, and sovereignty requirements
- Lead company-wide database infrastructure initiatives, author technical design documents, and establish scalable standards
- Partner cross-functionally to review architecture, solve infrastructure challenges, and drive adoption of consistent best practices
- Reduce database-related availability incidents toward zero through improved architecture and operating practices
Chainguard serves Fortune 500 enterprises and global leaders including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake. The company is venture-backed by Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 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 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, and 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
- Strong server-side Linux experience
- Proficiency programming in Go
- Experience writing production code and building infrastructure tooling
- Ability to evaluate existing systems, identify risk, and translate findings into opinionated architecture and implementation roadmap
- Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills 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 running stateful systems on Kubernetes
- Experience building database platforms or self-service database infrastructure for internal engineering teams
- Experience with database governance, automated policy enforcement, and developer enablement
About Chainguard
AI / Data / Infrastructure; Legal / Compliance / Risk — software supply-chain security and trusted container images.
