Staff Platform Database Engineer - Chainguard

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. This is a highly hands-onal Staff-level role where you'll write production code and lead company-wide technical initiatives.

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 high-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.
• Build tooling and automation: Develop production-grade tooling, governance models, and automated guardrails.
• Write production code: Contribute directly to the systems and tools supporting database deployment, management, and reliability.
• Support global scale: Design database systems that operate across regions while accounting for availability, latency, EU data residency, and sovereignty requirements.
• Provide technical leadership: Lead company-wide database infrastructure initiatives, author architectural design docs, and partner with Dev Platform, SRE, and Customer Engineering.

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, and distributed databases.
• Experience operating production database systems with global availability in high-scale environments.
• Experience designing and operating database infrastructure in AWS and Google Cloud.
• Strong server-side Linux experience.
• Proficiency programming in Go.
• 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.