Database Engineer

About Us

Chess.com is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the #1 platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess. We are a team of 600+ fully remote people in 60+ countries working hard to serve the global chess community. We are here to support 200M+ chess players worldwide with the best possible product, content, and tools to serve the community! We are a tech company. A gaming company. A content company. And we do it all with passion and commitment to the game. Above all we prize our mission-driven, flat, life-celebrating, no-corporate culture, and we look forward to meeting you and learning more about what you can bring to the team.

About You

The Database Engineer role is critical to building and evolving Chess.com's database infrastructure that supports millions of daily chess games, user interactions, and a large-scale social network. This position designs and builds high-performance, scalable database systems while driving automation, tooling, and architectural improvements across Chess.com's hybrid infrastructure combining bare-metal datacenters with cloud services. The role requires deep expertise in database internals, data modeling, distributed systems, and software engineering practices to build resilient systems that deliver optimal user experiences across Chess.com's global platform.

What you'll do

• 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

Required Skills

• 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

Preferred Skills

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

About the Opportunity

This is a full-time opportunity. We are 100% remote (work from anywhere!)