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Principal Customer Engineer

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Remote - United States
Customer Success

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. We have built the database for developers unlike any others – we kept the good parts of the relational database and left behind the baggage. Because our 'touch of the button' solutions are so unique, our customers choose to entrust us with what is often their most precious digital assets, so the stakes couldn't be higher.

We build our platform on top of Vitess, built by our co-founders at YouTube and Google. We also provide enterprise support for customers running Vitess in their environment. We are looking for a Principal Customer Engineer to anchor our team. 

What’s the job to be done?

  • You will provide support to both our cloud platform and enterprise customers.
  • You will triage, prioritize, and directly fix customer issues, while collaborating closely with our Engineering team. 

These attributes best describe you...

  • You have excellent debugging and troubleshooting skills; with a mix of enough experience and intuition to zero in on root-causes for bugs that can leave others stumped.
  • You are comfortable stepping outside your comfort zone. Be it delving into unfamiliar code in Vitess, one of its dependencies, or a random MySQL connector, written in a language you may not know (yet!). Working with code as your main source of documentation doesn't fluster you, and you are happy to help add/correct it as necessary where it may be inaccurate.
  • You can operate independently, but you know when you are in too deep and need to ask for help before going down a rabbit hole for days or weeks!.
  • You know how to work under pressure in times of urgency. We and our customers both take issues with their data platform seriously.
  • You have good customer-facing skills. Even though your primary task isn't interfacing directly with customers, we do believe in high-bandwidth engineer-to-engineer interaction with customers, where necessary, to troubleshoot issues.

What you will need

  • Experience deploying and running (or helping customers deploy and run) databases and applications, at scale.
  • Experience with MySQL.
  • Working knowledge of Kubernetes.
  • Strong networking background; we are often pulling up tcpdump traces to debug problems.
  • Programming experience: Golang preferred; but deep experience in back-end server or systems programming at some point in your career, preferably on mission-critical, concurrent code.

What else will help you be successful

  • Knowledge of common application deployment platforms and frameworks. Our customers use all kinds of languages and frameworks to speak to Vitess/PlanetScale.  While no-one can possibly be fluent with all of them, knowledge of a few can be super-useful.
  • Experience working in a remote organization
  • Basic knowledge of open source development and communities

At PlanetScale we believe in supporting people to do their best work and thrive no matter the location. Our mission is to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive company. We strive to build an inclusive environment where all people feel that they are equally respected and valued, whether they are a candidate or an employee. We welcome applicants of any educational background, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, citizenship, socioeconomic status, disability, pregnancy status, and veteran status.

If you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!


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Perks at PlanetScale

Work with top tier teammates around the globe
Competitive salary & equity
Unlimited PTO

Apply to Principal Customer Engineer

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