Database Platform Engineer, Proton

• 3+ years of hands-on experience operating highly available MySQL databases at scale in production
• Deep MySQL expertise: replication, query optimization, indexing, schema design, and performance tuning at the OS and application layers
• Solid experience with ProxySQL and Linux in production environments
• Strong automation background — you've meaningfully reduced operational toil through scripting or custom tooling (Python, Go, Bash, or equivalent)
• Comfortable with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, or comparable) and using data to diagnose and resolve complex infrastructure issues
• Experience running databases on bare-metal or on-premise infrastructure (not cloud-managed DB services)

Desirable

• The Database team owns the backbone of every Proton product — a web-scale fleet of mission-critical MySQL databases serving hundreds of millions of users worldwide
• We sit within the Infrastructure department and are responsible for making these databases available, performant, and secure as Proton's product surface keeps expanding
• We treat manual toil as a bug: automation is how we scale, not headcount
• You'll be joining at a critical phase — we're actively raising our automation ceiling, evaluating distributed database systems, and building the platform that will carry Proton through its next decade of growth
• If you want narrow scope and a clean backlog, this isn't the right fit
• Own the administration and reliability of Proton's web-scale MySQL fleet, accessed via ProxySQL, including participating in a 24/7 on-call rotation
• Design and implement automation that eliminates manual operational toil and measurably improves platform reliability
• Write code and tooling to improve how we manage, monitor, and scale the database platform — treating infrastructure as software
• Own performance tuning across the full stack — hardware, OS, storage, network, and query level — and resolve bottlenecks before they become incidents
• Drive database best practices into product design reviews, providing clear guidance on architecture, data modeling, scalability, and system integration
• Lead the planning and execution of database version upgrades and full stack updates with minimal service disruption
• Shape Proton's long-term database strategy — evaluating emerging technologies like distributed databases and influencing cross-company engineering standards