Software Engineer - Insights

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. The PlanetScale platform offers both Postgres and Vitess clusters. Vitess, an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enables businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience.

PlanetScale is seeking an engineer to join our Insights team to help build our customer facing database observability product. Insights helps developers understand their database performance and provides visibility into query patterns, performance metrics and database health across both Vitess/MySQL and PostgreSQL systems.

What You'll Do

Instrument Vitess, MySQL and PostgreSQL to emit performance data

Design, implement and maintain our data collection pipeline

Create intuitive dashboards and visualizations that surface actionable database insights

Develop APIs and integrations that expose insights data to customers

Collaborate with other teams to define the next generation of database observability features

Build tools for query analysis, performance profiling, and anomaly detection

Own features end-to-end, from initial design through production deployment and monitoring

Partner with customers and support teams to understand real-world observability challenges

What We're Looking For

Required:

5+ years of software engineering experience

Experience building observability, monitoring, or telemetry products (APM, logs, metrics, traces, etc.)

Experience with distributed systems and data pipelines

Proficiency with time-series data and aggregation patterns

Backend development experience (Go, Rust, Ruby, Python, or similar)

Comfort working across the full stack and switching between different technical domains

Ability to work in a self-directed environment

Nice to Have:

Knowledge of ClickHouse, Prometheus, or other time-series databases

Familiarity with streaming data systems (Kafka)

Background in database internals or query optimization