---
title: 'Solutions Engineer at PlanetScale'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-planetscale-emea-na-8nt7qr7hwjcp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Solutions Engineer at PlanetScale

- **Company:** PlanetScale
- **Location:** EMEA / NA
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2025-10-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/planetscale/jobs/4052805009

## Job description

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the transactional database market. The PlanetScale platform offers both Postgres and Vitess clusters. Vitess, an open-source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL, enables businesses to efficiently handle large-scale data workloads — without sacrificing developer experience.

PlanetScale is backed with over $100M in venture financing from top-tier VCs including a16z, Kleiner Perkins, SignalFire, and Insight Venture Partners. And we serve some of the most innovative companies in the world such as Block, Anysphere (Cursor), MyFitnessPal, Etsy, Kick, and thousands more. Our customers entrust us with what is often their most precious digital asset, their data, so the stakes couldn't be higher. We're looking for early members of our Sales team that can form deep partnerships with our prospects and customers to help them adopt and succeed on the next generation of database infrastructure.

What's the job to be done?

- Partner with Sales and Customer Engineering throughout the pre-sales and post-sales journey as the technical expert helping customers solve their most challenging database problems.
- Lead technical discovery to match customers’ business and technical objectives with PlanetScale’s offerings.
- Design and execute proof of value timelines that deliver on agreed upon business outcomes and success criteria.
- Design database migration strategies and work hands-on with customers to execute migrations to PlanetScale's PostgreSQL and Vitess platforms.
- Assess workloads, analyze performance requirements, and recommend architecture, sizing, and optimization strategies.
- Build tools, scripts, and automation that accelerate migrations and improve customer onboarding.
- Create educational content including documentation, guides, blog posts, workshops, and videos.
- Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to advocate for customer needs and shape the platform.

These attributes best describe you…

- You have deep expertise in database systems including replication, high availability, sharding, performance tuning, and migration strategies.
- You're equally comfortable presenting architecture designs to executives and writing scripts to automate migration tasks.
- You thrive in customer-facing situations and translate technical concepts into business value for diverse audiences.
- You're self-motivated and can manage multiple engagements simultaneously with minimal oversight.
- You enjoy creating content and sharing knowledge through various formats.
- You're comfortable with occasional travel (less than 20%).

## What you will need

- 5+ years of hands-on experience with MySQL or PostgreSQL in production, including operations, performance tuning, and troubleshooting OR
- 5+ years of experience supporting customers with MySQL or PostgreSQL workloads where you advised on operations, performance tuning, and troubleshooting
- Experience working with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, or OCI)
- Proven success in customer-facing technical roles such as Solutions Architect, Sales Engineer, or Technical Account Manager
- Strong understanding of database migration strategies and tooling
- Experience evaluating database solutions including architecture reviews, capacity planning, and performance analysis
- Ability to write scripts and tools in Python, Go, or JavaScript
- Experience creating technical content such as documentation, tutorials, or blog posts

What else will help you be successful

- Experience with AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) or logical replication tools
- Knowledge of Vitess, database sharding, or distributed database systems
- Familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or CloudFormation
- Contributions to open-source projects or active participation in database communities
- Public speaking experience at conferences or meetups

## 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 Solutions Engineer, you'll guide customers through transformational database migrations and help them unlock the full power of PlanetScale's platform.

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: $160,000 - $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

- [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 - Neki Orchestration](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-neki-orchestration-planetscale-san-francisco-bay-area-17wvnw7mrk4v) — San Francisco Bay Area, OR
- [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
- [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