Solutions Engineer

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the transactional database market. 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 backed with over $100M in venture financing from top-tier VCs including a16z, Kleiner Perkins, SignalFire, and Insight Venture Partners. And we serve some of the most innovative companies in the world such as Block, Anysphere (Cursor), MyFitnessPal, Etsy, Kick, and thousands more. 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 early members of our Sales team that can form deep partnerships with our prospects and customers to help them adopt and succeed on the next generation of database infrastructure.

What's the job to be done?

• Partner with Sales and Customer Engineering throughout the pre-sales and post-sales journey as the technical expert helping customers solve their most challenging database problems.

• Lead technical discovery to match customers’ business and technical objectives with PlanetScale’s offerings.

• Design and execute proof of value timelines that deliver on agreed upon business outcomes and success criteria.

• Design database migration strategies and work hands-on with customers to execute migrations to PlanetScale's PostgreSQL and Vitess platforms.

• Assess workloads, analyze performance requirements, and recommend architecture, sizing, and optimization strategies.

• Build tools, scripts, and automation that accelerate migrations and improve customer onboarding.

• Create educational content including documentation, guides, blog posts, workshops, and videos.

• Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to advocate for customer needs and shape the platform.

These attributes best describe you…

• You have deep expertise in database systems including replication, high availability, sharding, performance tuning, and migration strategies.

• You're equally comfortable presenting architecture designs to executives and writing scripts to automate migration tasks.

• You thrive in customer-facing situations and translate technical concepts into business value for diverse audiences.

• You're self-motivated and can manage multiple engagements simultaneously with minimal oversight.

• You enjoy creating content and sharing knowledge through various formats.

• You're comfortable with occasional travel (less than 20%).

What you will need

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with MySQL or PostgreSQL in production, including operations, performance tuning, and troubleshooting OR

• 5+ years of experience supporting customers with MySQL or PostgreSQL workloads where you advised on operations, performance tuning, and troubleshooting

• Experience working with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, or OCI)

• Proven success in customer-facing technical roles such as Solutions Architect, Sales Engineer, or Technical Account Manager

• Strong understanding of database migration strategies and tooling

• Experience evaluating database solutions including architecture reviews, capacity planning, and performance analysis

• Ability to write scripts and tools in Python, Go, or JavaScript

• Experience creating technical content such as documentation, tutorials, or blog posts

What else will help you be successful

• Experience with AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) or logical replication tools

• Knowledge of Vitess, database sharding, or distributed database systems

• Familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native architect...