Software Engineer - Insights
Join PlanetScale as a Software Engineer to build a customer-facing database observability product for Vitess and PostgreSQL.
Posted by employer 8 months ago
First seen on Joblaze 4 months ago
Last verified on the company career page 1 hour ago
AI in the day-to-day
You're excited about leveraging AI tools to move faster.
Requirements
- Experience
- 5+ years
Not disclosed in this posting: visa sponsorship.
Benefits
Joblaze summary
In this role, the Software Engineer on the Insights team at PlanetScale focuses on developing a customer-facing observability product that enhances database performance understanding. Key responsibilities include instrumenting databases, designing data collection pipelines, and creating dashboards that provide actionable insights. This position is ideal for a seasoned engineer with over five years of experience in observability tools and distributed systems, who thrives in a self-directed environment and enjoys tackling diverse technical challenges. PlanetScale emphasizes a collaborative culture and is recognized for its rapid growth and commitment to inclusivity.
Joblaze insights
- Listed about 4 months ago — first seen on Joblaze May 23, 2026. Last confirmed on PlanetScale's careers page October 8, 2026.
- Salary band is below the typical range for Backend roles (median ~$180,000).
- Starts above 1% of 146 comparable senior backend roles in United States that list Python we track (median $174,958 across 61 companies). See Python salary trends
- Python appears in 40.3% of 496 comparable senior backend roles in United States; Vitess appears in 0.6% of 496 comparable senior backend roles in United States.
Quick facts
- Is the Software Engineer - Insights role remote?
- Yes — PlanetScale lists this as a fully remote position.
- What's the salary range?
- PlanetScale lists $120,000–$290,000 for this role.
- How much experience is required?
- At least 5 years of relevant experience for this Software Engineer - Insights role.
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: Go, Kafka, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, Ruby.
- What seniority level is this role?
- PlanetScale targets senior candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Software Engineer - Insights role at PlanetScale.
From the original posting
PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. 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 seeking an engineer to join our Insights team to help build our customer facing database observability product. Insights helps developers understand their database performance and provides visibility into query patterns, performance metrics and database health across both Vitess/MySQL and PostgreSQL systems.
- Instrument Vitess, MySQL and PostgreSQL to emit performance data
- Design, implement and maintain our data collection pipeline
- Create intuitive dashboards and visualizations that surface actionable database insights
- Develop APIs and integrations that expose insights data to customers
- Collaborate with other teams to define the next generation of database observability features
- Build tools for query analysis, performance profiling, and anomaly detection
- Own features end-to-end, from initial design through production deployment and monitoring
- Partner with customers and support teams to understand real-world observability challenges
Required:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience
- Experience building observability, monitoring, or telemetry products (APM, logs, metrics, traces, etc.)
- Experience with distributed systems and data pipelines
- Proficiency with time-series data and aggregation patterns
- Backend development experience (Go, Rust, Ruby, Python, or similar)
- Comfort working across the full stack and switching between different technical domains
- Ability to work in a self-directed environment
Nice to Have:
- Knowledge of ClickHouse, Prometheus, or other time-series databases
- Familiarity with streaming data systems (Kafka)
- Background in database internals or query optimization
- Experience with MySQL, PostgreSQL or Vitess
You're someone who deeply understands the challenges developers face when debugging database performance issues. You've built observability tooling before and have strong opinions about what makes telemetry data useful versus overwhelming.
You enjoy wearing many hats and get energized by working on diverse problems across the stack. You ship quickly and iterate based on feedback. You collaborate effectively with engineers in different domains. You're excited about leveraging AI tools to move faster. You make pragmatic technical decisions and can work independently with minimal direction.
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.
Base salary range: $120,000 - $290,000 USD
Standard company text repeated across PlanetScale's postings is omitted here.