Database Engineer

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.

- 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

- 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

Chess.com is the world's largest online chess platform, offering free and premium play, lessons, tournaments, and community features to over 100 million users. It generates around $100 million in annual revenue primarily through a freemium model with subscriptions to remove ads and access advanced features, bolstered by network effects and partnerships with chess influencers.