Chess.com · 3 hours ago
Database Engineer
United States
Full-time
Remote
Senior Level
5+ years expChess.com is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the #1 platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess. The Database Engineer role is critical to building and evolving Chess.com's database infrastructure that supports millions of daily chess games and user interactions. This position involves designing high-performance, scalable database systems and driving automation and architectural improvements across Chess.com's infrastructure.
GamificationGaming
Responsibilities
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
Qualification
Required
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
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
Company
Chess.com
Chess.com is an online community for chess players to learn and discuss strategy and play with others in real-time.
501-1000 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$0.55MKey Investors
General Atlantic
2022-01-14Private Equity
2018-01-01Acquired
2013-01-01Secondary Market· $0.55M
Leadership Team
Adam Mayer
SVP of Monetization
Recent News
2025-12-15
Business Standard India
2025-12-15
Company data provided by crunchbase