Software Engineer - Postgres Internals

PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. 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. About the role As a PostgreSQL Core Engineer, you will spend most of your time contributing upstream to the PostgreSQL core engine and maintaining the Postgres extensions — both open-source community projects and Planetscale's proprietary extensions — that power our Postgres offering. What You'll Do Author and review patches to the PostgreSQL core engine: performance, features, bug fixes, and security — landed through the pgsql-hackers mailing list and the Commitfest process. Maintain Postgres extensions, both open-source (community projects we depend on) and proprietary (Planetscale-owned). Includes feature work, bug fixes, performance tuning, and major-version compatibility. Review community patches with rigor on correctness, stability, and PostgreSQL coding conventions. Engage the PostgreSQL community in design discussions, the 5 (five) annual Commitfests, and conferences. Root-cause Postgres issues affecting Planetscale customers and turn fixes into upstream patches when applicable. Improve documentation for PostgreSQL and our extensions as part of every change. What We're Looking For Required: Strong C programming skills in large, established codebases. Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals : MVCC, query planner/executor, WAL, vacuum, replication, memory contexts. Demonstrated open-source contributions to PostgreSQL or comparable database projects (accepted patches, reviews, or extensions). Fluency with Git and the PostgreSQL patch workflow. Comfortable in Linux/BSD development environments; able to profile and benchmark database workloads. Nice to Have: PostgreSQL contribution history. Experience authoring or maintaining a Postgres extension end-to-end (e.g., pgvector, pg_stat_statements, PostGIS). Background in distributed systems, storage engines, or query optimization. Public talks, papers, or blog posts in the Postgres ecosystem. About You You're someone who deeply under