Senior Database Platform Engineer

Proton was founded in 2014 by scientists from CERN on a simple truth: privacy is a fundamental human right. Since then, we've built the world's largest encrypted email service (Proton Mail) and expanded into Proton VPN, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, and Proton Calendar — tools used by millions globally to protect their freedom, fight censorship, and keep their data safe. In some situations, Proton has literally helped save lives.

We are profitable, independent (no VC control), and selectively hire from the top ~1% of applicants. Our 700+ team members across 50+ countries come from leading organizations and elite academic backgrounds. We move fast, keep hierarchy light, and prioritize impact over optics. If you want to do meaningful work with exceptionally high-caliber people, this is it. Check our open-source projects here.

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.

• Database: MySQL, ProxySQL
• Automation / Config management: Ansible, Puppet
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, PMM, Icinga
• OS / Infrastructure: Linux, bare-metal on-premise data centers
• Distributed DB (exploratory): CockroachDB, YugabyteDB

• →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

• 5+ 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)

• Hands-on experience with distributed databases such as CockroachDB or YugabyteDB
• Experience with Puppet or comparable configuration management systems
• Prior exposure to high-traffic, multi-tenant ProxySQL deployments

At Proton, we believe diversity drives innovation and strengthens our mission to provide privacy as a default for all. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where all individuals — regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, physical ability, or socio-economic background — feel valued and empowered.

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