Database Engineer

What you'll do

• 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

Required Skills

• 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

Preferred Skills

• Gaming industry experience with understanding of real-time gaming database requirements and low-latency data access patterns
• Deep MySQL internals knowledge including InnoDB internals, buffer pool tuning, redo/undo logs, and MVCC behavior
• Experience building database proxies or middleware (ProxySQL, Vitess, custom solutions) for connection management and query routing
• MySQL replication expertise including GTID-based replication, multi-source replication, and replication lag optimization
• Cloud database architecture experience with AWS (RDS, Aurora) and/or GCP (Cloud SQL, AlloyDB) for hybrid database strategies
• Experience with ScyllaDB and/or Cassandra for high-throughput, low-latency distributed workloads
• Knowledge of MySQL sharding and partitioning strategies for large-scale data distribution and query performance
• Experience building zero-downtime migration tooling (pt-online-schema-change, gh-ost) for schema evolution at scale
• Container and Kubernetes experience for database operator development and cloud-native MySQL deployments
• MySQL backup and recovery expertise including Percona XtraBackup, point-in-time recovery, and disaster recovery procedures