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Principal Customer Engineer

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Remote - North America
Customer Engineering

We are the first serverless database platform designed specifically with the developer in mind. Our products are loved by developers, builders, scalers, and creators alike. We harness the power of open source allowing unlimited scaling. No one else combines scalability and the developer experience like we do.

The database market is the most sought after in the VC space and is projected to be a $60 billion business by the end of 2022. The pace of innovation is mind-blowing. The opportunity is massive.

Created by the people who built the infrastructure at Twitter, Instagram, GitHub, and Slack. PlanetScale is a series C start-up with over $100 million in funding raised; and backed by leading VC companies like a16z, SignalFire, Insight Partners, and Kleiner Perkins.

We are just getting started!

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.

To support both our cloud platform and enterprise customers, the Customer Engineering team leads the way. We are looking for a Principal Customer Engineer to anchor our team.

What's the job to be done?

  • You will triage and prioritize customer issues, while collaborating with our Technical Account Management and Support teams.
  • You will work on finding the root cause for high priority customer issues, designing and implementing code fixes in our codebase, while collaborating as necessary with our core Engineering teams.

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 adapter framework, 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 are comfortable working 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
  • 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!

 

#LI-Recruiter

Perks at PlanetScale

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

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