Customer Engineer

PlanetScale

PlanetScale

Software Engineering, Customer Service
United States
Posted on Jun 3, 2021

Why PlanetScale

We are the first database platform that's best for serverless 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 it became 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!

Job Summary

We build our cloud DBaaS platform on top of Vitess, built by our co-founders at YouTube and Google. For our enterprise customers, the Customer Engineering team leads the way. We are looking for a Customer Engineer to expand our team. This is a software engineering position.

What's the job to be done?

  • You will help the Enterprise Support and Account Management team triage and prioritize customer issues, leveraging your technical expertise of our codebase(s).
  • You will work on identifying 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.
  • You will work on implementing high-impact product enhancements to make enterprise customers successful in deploying on our platform with our Professional Services team.
  • You will work on tooling for our internal teams to make them more effective and efficient at deploying and supporting customers on our platform.

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 take issues with their data platform seriously.
  • You have good customer-facing skills. Even though your primary task is not interacting directly with customers, we do believe in high-bandwidth engineer-to-engineer interaction with customers, where necessary, to troubleshoot issues.

What you will need

  • Programming experience is a requirement. Golang is preferred; but deep experience in back-end server or systems programming at some point in your career, preferably on mission-critical, concurrent code is a must.
  • Experience deploying and running (or helping customers deploy and run) databases and applications, at scale.
  • Experience with MySQL.
  • Working knowledge of Kubernetes.

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 need any accommodations, please inform our Talent Acquisition team upon initial contact. We are happy to accommodate you!

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: $133,000 | $156,000 | $179,000

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