Software Engineer - Sharded Postgres (Neki)

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. The PlanetScale platform offers both PostgresQL and Vitess clusters. Vitess is an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enables businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience. We're bringing the same scaling power to PostgreSQL with Neki, our sharded PostgreSQL product, and we're looking for Software Engineers to come help build it from scratch.

Our customers entrust us with what is often their most precious digital asset, their data, so the stakes couldn't be higher. We're looking for a Software Engineer to join our core engineering team and help us build the next generation of database infrastructure.

What's the job to be done?

You will work on building the best solution for sharded Postgres, a project we're calling Neki: https://www.neki.dev/

You will design and build critical systems that power PlanetScale's database platform, serving millions of queries per second for some of the world's largest applications.

You will collaborate with a team of expert engineers to solve complex distributed systems challenges.

You will work independently to solve engineering and business problems with little direction and high autonomy.

You will work directly with customers to understand their needs and translate them into robust technical solutions.

These attributes best describe you…

You are passionate about building high-quality, scalable systems and take pride in writing clean, maintainable code.

You have strong experience with distributed systems, databases, and performance optimization.

You are comfortable working with large codebases and can quickly understand and contribute to complex systems.

You thrive in a collaborative environment and enjoy mentoring junior engineers.

You have excellent problem-solving skills and can debug complex issues across multiple systems.

You are self-motivated and can work independently with minimal guidance while making sound technical decisions.

What you will need

5+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on backend systems, database engines, query planners, etc.

Strong proficiency in Go, with experience in other languages like Python or C++

Experience with not just operating, but developing PostgreSQL, MySQL or other databases

Experience building and operating distributed systems at scale

What else will help you be successful

Experience with database internals, query optimization, or distributed consensus algorithms

Contributions to open-source projects, especially in the database or infrastructure space

Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)