Database Engineer

About the role

This Database Engineer position is central to enhancing Chess.com's database infrastructure, which underpins daily chess games, user interactions, and a large social network. The role focuses on designing and building scalable systems, developing internal tools, and creating data pipelines for analytics and machine learning. You will also work on multi-regional database architectures to manage high volumes of data with minimal latency.

A key aspect of this role involves solving complex data modeling challenges, such as optimizing chess game storage, tracking puzzle attempts, and representing large social graphs. You will drive the evolution of the database platform by evaluating new technologies and architectural patterns. The position also requires building observability tools to monitor database behavior and capacity trends, ensuring continuous improvement and performance.

Collaboration with product engineering teams is essential to design optimal schemas and data layer integrations. You will implement infrastructure-as-code practices for database provisioning and management, aiming for high quality from the start. Participation in an on-call rotation is also required to maintain 24/7 database availability and contribute to incident post-mortems, ensuring system reliability.

The salary for this full-time remote position ranges from $80,500 to $138,000 USD annually.

Skills that matter here

• MySQL: Expert-level proficiency is needed for understanding internals, replication, and performance optimization in large-scale production environments.
• Python: Proficiency in Python is required for developing tooling, automation, and data pipelines.
• Go: Proficiency in Go is required for developing tooling, automation, and data pipelines.
• Redis: Experience with Redis is necessary for caching architectures, pub/sub systems, and high-performance data structures.
• Linux: Advanced Linux systems knowledge is important for understanding kernel behavior, I/O patterns, and hardware optimization for database workloads.
• Terraform: Proficiency with Terraform is needed for infrastructure-as-code practices in database provisioning and management.

Who this role suits

• A person with at least five years of professional database engineering experience in high-availability production systems.
• Someone who is adept at designing and building data pipelines using streaming or batch processing frameworks.
• An individual who understands distributed systems concepts, including CAP theorem trade-offs and consensus protocols.
• A candidate who is proactive in evaluating and implementing new technologies to drive continuous improvement in database platforms.

From the employer

• Design and architect database systems optimized for Chess.com's specific workloads including real-time gaming, puzzle systems, and social graph traversal
• Build internal tooling and automation to improve database deployment, migration, and operational efficiency, simplifying work streams for the broader engineering organization
• Develop data pipelines and ETL processes for analytics, machine learning features, and cross-system data synchronization
• Engineer multi-regional database architectures capable of handling massive volumes of chess games, user data, and social network interactions with minimal latency
• Solve complex data modeling challenges including chess game storage optimization, puzzle attempt tracking, and large-scale social graph representation
• Drive database platform evolution evaluating and implementing new technologies, storage engines, and architectural patterns with a bias toward continuous improvement
• Build observability and performance tooling providing deep visibility into database behavior, query patterns, and capacity trends
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to design optimal schemas, access patterns, and data layer integrations, ensuring the right people have the information they need
• Implement infrastructure-as-code practices for database provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management with high first-time-right quality
• Participate in on-call rotation to ensure 24/7 database availability and contribute to incident post-mortems

• 5+ years of professional database engineering experience with large-scale, high-availability database systems in production environments
• Expert-level proficiency with MySQL (Percona) including internals, storage engine behavior, replication topologies, and performance optimization
• Strong software engineering skills with proficiency in Python and/or Go for tooling, automation, and data pipeline development
• Experience designing and building data pipelines using streaming or batch processing frameworks
• Strong experience with Redis for caching architectures, pub/sub systems, and high-performance data structures
• Advanced Linux systems knowledge with understanding of kernel behavior, I/O patterns, and hardware optimization for database workloads
• Experience with distributed systems concepts including CAP theorem trade-offs, consensus protocols, and partition tolerance
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi) for database infrastructure automation
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, PMM) for building database observability solutions
• Strong understanding of query optimization including execution plans, index design, and workload analysis