Database Engineer

About You

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

What you'll do

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

Contacts