---
title: 'Software Engineer - Neki Orchestration at PlanetScale'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-neki-orchestration-planetscale-san-francisco-bay-area-17wvnw7mrk4v'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Software Engineer - Neki Orchestration at PlanetScale

- **Company:** PlanetScale
- **Location:** San Francisco Bay Area, OR
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-06-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/planetscale/jobs/4280570009

## Job description

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. The PlanetScale platform offers both PostgresQL and Vitess clusters. Vitess is an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enables businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience. We're bringing the same scaling power to PostgreSQL with Neki, our sharded PostgreSQL product, and we're looking for Software Engineers to come help orchestrate Neki.

Our customers entrust us with their most precious digital asset, their data, so the stakes couldn't be higher. We're looking for a Software Engineer to join our Neki team to bring Neki to the cloud.

What's the job to be done?

- You will design and build the control plane that provisions, scales, and heals Neki clusters with minimal customer-visible downtime.
- You will build and maintain high availability, disaster recovery, and data protection solutions that keep customer databases safe through infrastructure failures.
- You will build tooling and automation for database operations, backup, restore, and migration workflows - and participate in an on-call rotation.
- You will work directly with customers to understand their workloads and translate real-world needs into platform improvements.

These attributes best describe you…

- You have strong experience building, operating, or maintaining large-scale Postgres deployments in production.
- You have an excellent understanding of low-level operating systems concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking, storage, and performance.
- You have strong fundamental computer science skills and can reason about distributed, fault-tolerant systems.
- You thrive in a collaborative environment, enjoy mentoring other engineers, and communicate complex technical tradeoffs clearly.
- You are self-motivated and can work independently with minimal guidance while making sound technical decisions.

## What you will need

- 5+ years of software engineering experience designing, building, and supporting large-scale systems in production.
- Strong proficiency in Go, with experience in other languages like Ruby, Python etc
- Experience building and maintaining distributed, fault-tolerant services.
- Working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized applications.
- Experience building and operating distributed systems at scale.

What else will help you be successful

- Experience building or operating a database-as-a-service or managed database platform.
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and infrastructure-as-code.
- Contributions to open-source projects, especially in the Postgres or database infrastructure space.
- Experience working with remote, geographically distributed teams.
- Previous experience at a high-growth technology company.

## 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.

At PlanetScale we believe in supporting people to do their best work and thrive no matter the location. Our mission is to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive company. We strive to build an inclusive environment where all people feel that they are equally 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 if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!

Total Compensation and Pay Transparency

An employee's total compensation consists of base salary + variable comp where appropriate + benefits + equity. A member of our Talent Acquisition team will be happy to answer any further questions when we engage with you to begin the interview process.

Base salary range: $120,000 - $290,000 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

- [Brand Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/brand-designer-planetscale-united-states-5xdafhk747av) — United States
- [Sales Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-planetscale-san-francisco-xaskqzt5fqsy) — San Francisco, CA
- [Customer Support Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-support-engineer-planetscale-emea-tm32e6rwd1st) — EMEA
- [Software Engineer - Internal Tools](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-internal-tools-planetscale-san-francisco-gre3a4js3b0z) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Events](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-events-planetscale-san-francisco-twwtbw0mjzs7) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer - PlanetScale Postgres](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-planetscale-postgres-planetscale-remote-ztb3q0h8cqcs)
- [Software Engineer - Insights](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-insights-planetscale-san-francisco-bay-area-7bg68y1amz5p) — San Francisco Bay Area, OR
- [Solutions Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-planetscale-emea-na-8nt7qr7hwjcp) — EMEA / NA
- [Developer Educator](https://feeny.ai/job/developer-educator-planetscale-san-francisco-k6cdbr77v42h) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer - Sharded Postgres (Neki)](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-sharded-postgres-neki-planetscale-san-francisco-bay-area-xsq0y77zbpj2) — San Francisco Bay Area, OR