Software Engineer - Internal Tools

About the role

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. The PlanetScale platform offers both PostgresQL and Vitess clusters. Vitess is an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enables businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience. We're bringing the same scaling power to PostgreSQL with Neki, our sharded PostgreSQL product, and we're looking for Software Engineers to come help orchestrate Neki.

We're hiring a software engineer to build the internal tools that run PlanetScale. You'll report directly to our SVP of Engineering. You'll automate the manual work that slows a growing company down: incident response, on-call, support workflows, on=boarding, and the dozens of other small things that take up our time.

This is an in-office role. You'll work from our San Francisco headquarters most days a week.

What You'll Do

Build AI-enabled tools and agents that automate manual work across engineering, support, and operations

Write bots and integrations for Slack, PagerDuty, and the other systems we run the business on

Build internal dashboards that give the team visibility into what's actually happening

Integrate LLM APIs and AI coding tools directly into the internal systems you build

Ship small, useful things fast. Iterate based on what people need

Work directly with senior engineers and leadership to find friction and fix it

Own your projects end to end: design, build, ship, support

For example, you might:

Automate our incident response process

Build automations for customer support

Build internal dashboards that measure our service quality

What We're Looking For

Required:

0-2 years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent project or internship work

Solid fundamentals in at least one of TypeScript, Ruby, or Go

Comfortable building with AI coding tools and LLM APIs. This role is AI-enabled work, not just AI-assisted

Comfort writing scripts, small services, or automations that solve a real problem

Clear written communication

Willing and able to work in person from our San Francisco office

Nice to Have:

Experience with Slack's API, GitHub Actions, or similar automation platforms

Exposure to Terraform or Kubernetes

A side project, bot, or tool you built to automate something in your own life

About You

You fix the annoying thing to save time. You'd rather ship something small this week than plan something big for next quarter. You ask good questions, take feedback well, and want to learn from engineers more senior than you. You want to be in the room with your team, not on a call. You're excited about AI tools not just to write code faster, but to design and ship whole systems.

Why PlanetScale

We're redefining how high-growth companies manage data at scale—and we work with some of the most exciting brands in gaming, consumer tech, and B2B SaaS. As a Software Engineer, you'll 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 and is recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in America.

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 have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!

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.

Base salary range: $120,000 - $160,000 USD