At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff , payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR , so owners can focus on their craft and their customers.

We're looking for an experienced engineer with deep expertise in distributed data systems to shape the future of Gusto's storage layer. You'll manage complex migrations, architect high-scale systems, and set standards for automation, resiliency, and security. This is a high-impact role where you'll implement distributed database solutions that enable Gusto's continued growth and scale.

About the Team

The Datastores Infrastructure Engineering team designs, builds, and operates the data platforms that power Gusto's product: MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Kafka, and S3. We ensure our infrastructure is consistent, reliable, and ready to support Gusto's growing needs. As we transition to self-hosted distributed databases, the team is focused on reducing blast radius, improving operational resilience, and enabling sustainable scale.

Responsibilities

• Architect, deploy, and own the full lifecycle of distributed database systems (TiDB) on Kubernetes at scale, ensuring high availability, data consistency, and operational excellence
• Coordinate complex, zero-downtime migrations from monolithic to distributed architectures, including vertical sharding to isolate Product Services
• Define and drive efficiency improvements across the storage infrastructure through query optimization, caching strategies, and workload management
• Define standards and build reliable automation to ensure data consistency, integrity, and security across distributed systems
• Continuously improve operational excellence by reducing on-call burden through sustainable, long-term solutions
• Partner with product engineering teams and technical collaborators to enable rapid and reliable product development
• Mentor engineers across the Datastores Infrastructure team on best practices for operating complex, self-hosted distributed systems, actively developing our collective operational expertise

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience building and scaling large-scale infrastructure systems
• Hands-on experience building and operating distributed databases on Kubernetes (strongly preferred: TiDB; alternatively: CockroachDB, Vitess, Citus, or similar solutions)
• Deep expertise in distributed data systems including horizontal sharding, partitioning strategies, and distributed transaction management
• Proven experience coordinating complex, zero-downtime migrations affecting production systems at scale
• 5+ years of AWS experience with RDS, Aurora, caching systems (Redis/ValKey), streaming platforms (Kafka), and infrastructure optimization at scale
• Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify technical complexity and collaborate on technical direction across teams
• Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment, leveraging AI tooling to enhance infrastructure operations, driving improvements in query optimization, performance evaluation, and infrastructure automation
• Bonus: Experience with service extraction and vertical sharding from monolithic architectures
• Bonus: Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $200,000-$230,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $230,000-$270,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

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As a Developer Educator, you will create technical content to help customers and engineers at-large learn how Postgres, MySQL, Vitess, Neki, and the PlanetScale ecosystem works. You will also speak at conferences and events, representing PlanetScale in the database and engineering community. Additionally, you will create and refine product documentation, host livestreams and webinars to engage with and educate our community, and travel to connect with developers at events worldwide.

The ideal candidate is someone who teaches complex technical concepts in accessible ways, loves learning about and explaining full-stack application development, databases, and compute infrastructure, and is a natural communicator who can adapt their message for different audiences. They should thrive in community settings and enjoy building relationships with developers, have excellent writing skills, and be self-motivated and able to manage multiple projects independently.

What you will need includes 2+ years of experience in engineering, solution architecture, technical education, or developer relations, a strong understanding of relational databases (Postgres or MySQL), proven ability to create technical content, experience speaking at conferences or hosting technical presentations and events, and a willingness to travel between 20-50% of the time.

Experience with Vitess or other distributed database technologies, knowledge of distributed systems and database scaling challenges, and previous experience at a database or infrastructure company are also desirable.

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As a Solutions Engineer, you will 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. You will lead technical discovery to match customers' business and technical objectives with PlanetScale's offerings. You will design and execute proof of value timelines that deliver on agreed-upon business outcomes and success criteria. You will design database migration strategies and work hands-on with customers to execute migrations to PlanetScale's PostgreSQL and Vitess platforms. You will assess workloads, analyze performance requirements, and recommend architecture, sizing, and optimization strategies. You will build tools, scripts, and automation that accelerate migrations and improve customer onboarding. You will create educational content including documentation, guides, blog posts, workshops, and videos. You will collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to advocate for customer needs and shape the platform.

You have deep expertise in database systems including replication, high availability, sharding, performance tuning, and migration strategies. You are 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 are self-motivated and can manage multiple engagements simultaneously with minimal oversight. You enjoy creating content and sharing knowledge through various formats. You are comfortable with occasional travelmaxcdn< 20%.

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