[Hiring] Software Engineer - Postgres Internals @PlanetScale

Role Description

As a PostgreSQL Core Engineer, you will spend most of your time contributing upstream to the PostgreSQL core engine and maintaining the Postgres extensions — both open-source community projects and Planetscale's proprietary extensions — that power our Postgres offering.

What You'll Do

• Author and review patches to the PostgreSQL core engine: performance, features, bug fixes, and security — landed through the pgsql-hackers mailing list and the Commitfest process.
• Maintain Postgres extensions, both open-source (community projects we depend on) and proprietary (Planetscale-owned). Includes feature work, bug fixes, performance tuning, and major-version compatibility.
• Review community patches with rigor on correctness, stability, and PostgreSQL coding conventions.
• Engage the PostgreSQL community in design discussions, the 5 (five) annual Commitfests, and conferences.
• Root-cause Postgres issues affecting Planetscale customers and turn fixes into upstream patches when applicable.
• Improve documentation for PostgreSQL and our extensions as part of every change.

Qualifications

• Strong C programming skills in large, established codebases.
• Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals: MVCC, query planner/executor, WAL, vacuum, replication, memory contexts.
• Demonstrated open-source contributions to PostgreSQL or comparable database projects (accepted patches, reviews, or extensions).
• Fluency with Git and the PostgreSQL patch workflow.
• Comfortable in Linux/BSD development environments; able to profile and benchmark database workloads.

Requirements

• PostgreSQL contribution history.
• Experience authoring or maintaining a Postgres extension end-to-end (e.g., pgvector, pg_stat_statements, PostGIS).
• Background in distributed systems, storage engines, or query optimization.
• Public talks, papers, or blog posts in the Postgres ecosystem.

Benefits

• We're redefining how high-growth companies manage data at scale.
• Work with some of the most exciting brands in gaming, consumer tech, and B2B SaaS.
• Be at the core of building the platform that powers world-class apps used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
• PlanetScale is a profitable company with a philosophy centered around building small teams of p99 individuals.
• Recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in America.