# Database Engineer

**Company:** [Chess.com](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/chess-com)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Data Engineering
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** MySQL, Percona, Redis, Python, Go, Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, Datadog, Prometheus, Linux, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Cassandra
**Posted:** 2026-01-23

> Designs and architects scalable database systems for high-traffic gaming workloads, builds automation tooling and data pipelines, and optimizes performance for real-time chess games and social features. Requires 5+ years experience with MySQL, Redis, Python/Go, and infrastructure-as-code tools.

## Job Description

## 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

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