---
title: 'Senior Product and Commercial Counsel at PlanetScale'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-and-commercial-counsel-planetscale-san-francisco-akggactq3wp7'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-07'
---

# Senior Product and Commercial Counsel at PlanetScale

- **Company:** PlanetScale
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Posted:** 2026-10-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-07
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/planetscale/jobs/4434574009

## Job description

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. Our database platform offers developers the fastest and most reliable Postgres and Vitess/MySQL databases, enabling businesses to efficiently handle data and workloads of all sizes.

PlanetScale is backed by over $100M in venture financing from top-tier investors, including a16z, Kleiner Perkins, SignalFire, and Insight Venture Partners. We serve some of the most innovative companies in the world, including Block, Anysphere (Cursor), MyFitnessPal, Etsy, Kick, and thousands more. Our customers entrust us with what is often their most precious digital asset: their data.

We’re looking for a Senior Product and Commercial Counsel to help us build, sell, and scale responsibly. You’ll own important commercial negotiations, advise on product and privacy matters, and work directly with leadership on decisions that shape our business.

These attributes best describe you

- You combine strong legal judgment with business understanding. You distinguish material risks from theoretical ones and find workable paths forward.
- You lead with empathy. You listen carefully, understand other people’s goals and pressures, and build trust with colleagues and counterparties.
- You communicate clearly. You explain complex issues in plain language and tailor your advice to the audience. Your colleagues know what you recommend and why.
- You enjoy ownership. You’re comfortable making decisions, moving work forward independently, and recognizing when to seek input.
- You’re curious about technology. You want to understand how our products work and are comfortable asking engineers questions, tracing data flows, and learning unfamiliar concepts.
- You thrive in a small team. You’re equally willing to negotiate a complex agreement, help a colleague work through a question, or improve a process.

## What you will need

- A J.D. and active membership in at least one U.S. state bar, with eligibility to practice in your work location.
- At least 7 years of relevant legal experience, including substantial experience negotiating technology transactions.
- Experience advising technology businesses on customer and vendor agreements, privacy, and data protection.
- Strong drafting and negotiation skills, with the ability to translate technical and commercial details into clear contractual terms.
- Excellent interpersonal skills and a demonstrated ability to build productive relationships across functions.
- The judgment and organizational skills to manage multiple matters independently in a fast-moving environment.

What else will help you be successful

- In-house experience at a SaaS, cloud infrastructure, or other technology company.
- Experience advising Sales, Marketing, Engineering, and Security teams.
- Familiarity with AI, open source software, intellectual property licensing, or international data protection requirements.
- Experience supporting enterprise customers, strategic partnerships, or new business models.

## Why PlanetScale

At PlanetScale, legal work is closely connected to the technology we build and the businesses we serve. You’ll work with people who care deeply about their craft, tackle substantive questions, and see the impact of your advice.

We value small teams, strong judgment, and individual ownership. You’ll have direct access to leadership and the opportunity to shape both business decisions and the way our legal team operates. As the company grows, there is room to deepen your expertise, expand your scope, and build programs you can call your own.

Our mission is to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive company where people feel 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 how we can make the interview process better for you. We’re happy to accommodate.

Total Compensation and Pay Transparency

Total compensation consists of base salary, benefits, and equity. Our Talent Acquisition team will be happy to discuss the details during the interview process.

Base salary range: $180,000 - $250,000 USD

## About PlanetScale

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: PlanetScale is a fully managed relational database platform for Vitess and Postgres, bringing scale, performance, and reliability without sacrificing developer experience.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Jiten Vaidya, Sugu Sougoumarane, and the co-creators/maintainers of the Vitess open source project

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Cloud Database Infrastructure / Software Development
- Target customers: B2B; primarily mid-market to enterprise companies with high-scale database needs (also serves SMBs via self-serve plans starting at $5/month)
- Mission or purpose statement: To build the future of databases — the database their team wished they had at previous companies like YouTube, Facebook, GitHub, and Slack.

## Products & Services
- **[PlanetScale Vitess (MySQL)]**: A fully managed MySQL-compatible database powered by the Vitess open-source project. Offers horizontal sharding for unlimited scalability, zero-downtime schema changes, and high availability. Used by companies like Slack, HubSpot, and GitHub.
- **[PlanetScale Postgres]**: A fully managed PostgreSQL database built for performance and reliability. Features NVMe-backed performance ("PlanetScale Metal"), connection pooling, branch-per-environment workflows, and automated failover. Starts at $5/month.
- **[Neki]**: A next-generation Postgres sharding architecture (currently in private early access) designed for massive scale and fault tolerance on PostgreSQL workloads.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed; last known Series C was $50M (announced November 2021)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of **$105M** across 3 rounds; estimated annual revenue of **$4.5M** (per LinkedIn)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: SignalFire (Seed lead), Andreessen Horowitz (Series A & C lead), and other investors.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew **57.6% YoY** (81 employees as of mid-2025), with operations in 14 countries. LinkedIn followers grew 36.6% in the last year. SOC 2 Type 2+ and HIPAA compliant; PCI DSS 4.0 Level 1 Service Provider.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Founding team = Vitess creators**: Built by the original creators and maintainers of Vitess (the CNCF project that scales YouTube, Slack, and GitHub), giving them unmatched expertise in distributed MySQL.
- **Performance leadership**: PlanetScale Metal is benchmarked as the fastest Postgres in the cloud, with unlimited IOPS on NVMe drives.
- **Superior developer experience**: Unique features like database branching (branch-per-environment), revertable schema changes with zero data loss, and "Database Traffic Control" for query budget management.
- **High reliability**: SLA of 99.999% for multi-region deployments and 99.99% for single-region deployments.
- **Cost advantage**: Positions itself as less expensive than Amazon RDS/Aurora for ~85% of migrated workloads.

## Strategic Focus
- **Postgres expansion**: Launching and scaling PlanetScale Postgres, including the Neki sharding architecture, to capture the growing Postgres market.
- **Horizontal scaling for Postgres**: Neki is a key differentiator — bringing Vitess-style sharding to PostgreSQL workloads.
- **Enterprise compliance**: Deepening SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI DSS compliance to win larger enterprise deals.
- **Developer education**: Investing in developer relations and education to drive adoption (e.g., MCP server for AI agent access, extensive documentation).
- **Global infrastructure**: Expanding multi-region support and bring-your-own-cloud (PlanetScale Managed) options.

## Why Work Here
- **Remote-forward culture**: Highly distributed team across the US and EMEA; many roles are listed as "Remote - US" or "Remote - EMEA."
- **World-class engineering team**: Founded by database experts with a combined 600+ years of experience scaling systems at companies like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Dropbox, and GitHub. "Experts leading experts" is a core value.
- **Values-driven culture**: Core values include "Every day matters," "We are fearless," "No passengers" (everyone drives the company forward), and "No replacement for displacement" (speed and performance matter).
- **High-impact work**: Employees work on solving some of the hardest problems in distributed systems and database infrastructure.
- **Compensation**: Public salary ranges (e.g., Software Engineer: ~$138k+/annual, Account Executive: ~$140k+/annual), indicating transparency.
- **Notable perks**: SOC 2/HIPAA/PCI compliant infrastructure; modern tech stack; work with Vitess, Postgres, and cloud-native technologies.
- **Hiring restrictions**: Cannot hire from sanctioned countries (North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Crimea) or Mainland China due to US regulations.

## Sources
1. [planetscale.com](https://planetscale.com/)
2. [planetscale.com/about](https://planetscale.com/about)
3. [planetscale.com/careers](https://planetscale.com/careers)
4. [planetscale.com/docs/what-is-planetscale](https://planetscale.com/docs/what-is-planetscale)
5. [linkedin.com/company/planetscale](https://www.linkedin.com/company/planetscale)

## Other roles at PlanetScale

- [Compliance Program Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/compliance-program-manager-planetscale-united-states-hzmttbkzbx1q) — United States
- [AI Developer Experience Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-developer-experience-engineer-planetscale-united-states-j9cq03gww16b) — United States
- [Video Editor](https://feeny.ai/job/video-editor-planetscale-united-states-0bjfb84ypqb9) — United States
- [Customer Support Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-support-engineer-planetscale-united-states-g9ez9152zmp7) — United States
- [Brand Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/brand-designer-planetscale-united-states-5xdafhk747av) — United States
- [Customer Support Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-support-engineer-planetscale-emea-na-tm32e6rwd1st) — EMEA / NA
- [Software Engineer - Internal Tools](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-internal-tools-planetscale-san-francisco-gre3a4js3b0z) — San Francisco, CA
- [Field Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/field-marketing-manager-planetscale-san-francisco-twwtbw0mjzs7) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer - PlanetScale Postgres](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-planetscale-postgres-planetscale-remote-ztb3q0h8cqcs)
- [Solutions Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-planetscale-emea-na-8nt7qr7hwjcp) — EMEA / NA