Database Engineer at Chess

About Us

Chess.com is one of the world's largest gaming sites and the premier platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess. Our team comprises over 600 fully remote individuals across more than 60 countries, all dedicated to serving the global chess community. We strive to support over 200 million chess players worldwide with the best possible products, content, and tools.

We are a tech company, a gaming company, and a content company, driven by passion and commitment to the game. Above all, we value our mission-driven, flat, life-celebrating, non-corporate culture, and we look forward to learning what you can bring to our team.

About You

The Database Engineer role is essential for developing and enhancing Chess.com's database infrastructure, which supports millions of daily chess games, user interactions, and a large-scale social network. This position involves designing and building high-performance, scalable database systems while promoting automation, tooling, and architectural improvements across Chess.com's hybrid infrastructure, which combines bare-metal data centers with cloud services.

The role demands deep expertise in database internals, data modeling, distributed systems, and software engineering practices to construct resilient systems that deliver optimal user experiences across Chess.com's global platform.

What You'll Do

• Design and architect database systems specifically optimized for Chess.com's unique workloads, including real-time gaming, puzzle systems, and social graph traversal.
• Develop internal tooling and automation to enhance database deployment, migration, and operational efficiency, thereby streamlining workflows for the broader engineering organization.
• Create data pipelines and ETL processes for analytics, machine learning features, and cross-system data synchronization.
• Engineer multi-regional database architectures capable of managing massive volumes of chess games, user data, and social network interactions with minimal latency.
• Resolve complex data modeling challenges, such as optimizing chess game storage, tracking puzzle attempts, and representing large-scale social graphs.
• Drive the evolution of the database platform by evaluating and implementing new technologies, storage engines, and architectural patterns, always with a focus on continuous improvement.
• Build observability and performance tooling to provide deep insight into database behavior, query patterns, and capacity trends.
• Collaborate with product engineering teams to design optimal schemas, access patterns, and data layer integrations, ensuring that relevant information is accessible to the right people.
• Implement infrastructure-as-code practices for database provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management, ensuring high first-time-right quality.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to guarantee 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 its 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, including an 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 developing database observability solutions.
• Strong understanding of query optimization, including execution plans, index design, and workload analysis.

Preferred Skills

• Gaming industry experience, with an 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.
• A proven track record of accumulating wins - a 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!