About the role

  • Database Engineer at Chess.com, designing scalable database infrastructure for millions of daily games and user interactions. Driving automation and improvements across hybrid architecture with cloud services.

Responsibilities

  • 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

Requirements

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

Benefits

  • 100% remote (work from anywhere!)

Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Mid levelSenior

Salary

Not specified

Degree requirement

Bachelor's Degree

Tech skills

AnsibleAWSCassandraCloudDistributed SystemsETLGoogle Cloud PlatformKubernetesLinuxMySQLOpen SourcePrometheusPythonRedisSQLTerraformGo

Location requirements

RemoteWorldwide

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