Director, Customer Engineering
PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. The PlanetScale platform is built on Vitess, an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enabling businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience.
Our customers entrust us with what is often their most precious digital asset, their data, so the stakes couldn't be higher. On top of supporting workloads running on our managed platform, we also provide enterprise support for customers running Vitess in their own environment.
To support both our cloud platform and enterprise customers, the Customer Engineering team leads the way. We are looking for a strong technical leader to anchor that team and grow happy customers.
What’s the job to be done?
- You will lead our Customer Engineering team, the face of PlanetScale to our Enterprise customers.
- You will triage and prioritize customer issues while collaborating with our Technical Account Management and Support teams.
- You will act as an escalation point for high priority customer issues, debugging and collaborating as necessary with our core Engineering teams.
These attributes best describe you…
- You are the leader that people want to work with: empathetic, firm and fair to those that you work with. PlanetScale believes that 'experts leading experts' is the only way to operate, and you embody that value.
- You have excellent debugging and troubleshooting skills; with a mix of enough experience and intuition to zero in on root-causes for problems that can leave others stumped.
- You are comfortable stepping outside your comfort zone. Delving into unfamiliar code in Vitess, one of its dependencies, or a random MySQL adapter framework, written in a language you may not know.
- 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 and know how to handle escalations and liaise with people in good and bad situations.
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
- Experience working in and running a 24/7 on-call rotation for critical applications
What else will help you be successful
- Prior experience building support and shift-based teams and organizations
- Experience working in a remote organization
- Basic knowledge of open source development and communities
- The more debugging and troubleshooting experience around databases the better, there is no such thing as too much
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!
Total Compensation and Pay Transparency
An employee’s total compensation consists of base salary + variable comp where appropriate + benefits + equity. A member of our Talent Acquisition team will be happy to answer any further questions when we engage with you to begin the interview process.
Salary range: $140,000 - $210,000 USD
Email careers@planetscale.com to apply for this role.