Chainguard is the trusted source for open source. By delivering hardened, secure, and production-ready builds of all the open source software engineers and AI agents rely on, Chainguard helps organizations build faster, stay compliant, and eliminate risk.

Our customers include Fortune 500 enterprises and global industry leaders, including Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Snap Inc., and Snowflake.

Chainguard is venture-backed by leading investors, including Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.

Staff Platform Database Engineer

The role, in a nutshell

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.

You’ll begin by understanding the current landscape: inventorying our database systems, identifying the highest-impact and highest-risk environments, and prioritizing opportunities to improve resiliency and reduce blast radius. From there, you’ll help shape the architecture, tooling, governance, documentation, and automated guardrails that will guide database operations across the company.

This is a highly hands-on Staff-level role. You’ll write production code, work directly with engineering teams, and lead company-wide technical initiatives while helping establish an opinionated database platform strategy for the future.

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 the highest-impact and highest-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 across globally distributed systems.
Build tooling and automation. Develop production-grade tooling, governance models, and automated guardrails that make the right database practices easy to adopt and difficult to bypass.
Write production code. Contribute directly to the systems and tools that support database deployment, management, and reliability.
Support global scale. Help design database systems that can operate across regions and geographies while accounting for availability, latency, EU data residency, and sovereignty requirements.
Reduce operational risk. Improve database architecture and operating practices with the goal of driving database-related availability incidents toward zero.
Provide technical leadership. Lead a company-wide database infrastructure initiative — establishing scalable standards, authoring architectural design docs, and partnering across engineering teams to improve architecture and drive consistent practices.

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
Distributed databases operating across geographies