Developer Educator at PlanetScale | $130K–$200K + Equity in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
A High-Visibility Role at a Fast-Growing Database Startup
PlanetScale occupies a compelling niche — a developer-first database platform built on Vitess (originally developed at YouTube/Google). The company has strong VC backing and a reputation for attracting top-tier engineers, which signals a high-performance culture.
Compensation: The $130K–$200K base is well above market for a Developer Advocate/Educator role. Industry benchmarks typically place senior DevRel at $120K–$160K at comparable startups, so the upper end suggests real room for growth and strong negotiating leverage if you bring proven community traction.
Skills You'll Develop:
- Deep expertise in Postgres, MySQL, and Vitess — highly marketable distributed database skills
- Public speaking and conference presence, building a personal brand in the developer community
- Technical content strategy, documentation, and developer marketing — cross-functional skills valued at any SaaS company
Green Flags: Small, elite team philosophy ("p99 individuals"), equity compensation, and a product that developers genuinely use create strong conditions for impactful work and visibility.
Watch For: The 20–50% travel requirement is significant and can cause burnout in DevRel roles. Also, the role straddles education and marketing — candidates should clarify how success is measured (content metrics, community growth, pipeline influence) to ensure alignment with personal career goals.
Overall, this is a strong career move for someone aiming to become a recognized voice in the database/infrastructure space.
Headquarters: San Francisco and/or US Remote
PlanetScale is growing rapidly and reinventing the database space. Our database platform offers developers the fastest and most reliable Postgres and Vitess+MySQL databases, enabling businesses to efficiently handle data and workloads of all scales.
We also take DX seriously. Our platform enables developers with deep performance insights, AI integration, powerful cluster management, and schema migration tooling.
Our customers trust us with what is often their most precious digital asset: their data. The stakes couldn't be higher. We're looking for a Developer Educator who is excited about bringing database education to new heights, creating unique and engaging content, helping customers, and building the PlanetScale engineering community at conferences, events, and online.
The Job
- Create technical content to help customers and engineers at-large learn how Postgres, MySQL, Vitess, Neki, and the PlanetScale ecosystem works
- Speak at conferences and events, representing PlanetScale in the database and engineering community
- Create and refine product documentation
- Host livestreams and webinars to engage with and educate our community
- Your role may contain between 20–50% travel to connect with developers at events worldwide
The Ideal Candidate
- Teaches complex technical concepts in accessible ways
- Loves learning about and explaining full-stack application development, databases, and compute infrastructure
- Is a natural communicator who can adapt your message for different audiences
- Thrives in community settings and enjoys building relationships with developers
- Has excellent writing skills and can produce content that engineers actually want to read
- Is self-motivated and can manage multiple projects independently
- Enjoys experimenting with new ideas to further the education and marketing mission at PlanetScale
What You Will Need
- 2+ years of experience in engineering, solution architecture, technical education, or developer relations
- Strong understanding of relational databases (Postgres or MySQL)
- Proven ability to create technical content (samples of blog posts, tutorials, documentation, or speaking engagements)
- Experience speaking at conferences or hosting technical presentations and events
- Willingness to travel between 20–50% of the time
What Else Will Help You Be Successful
- Experience with Vitess or other distributed database technologies
- Knowledge of distributed systems and database scaling challenges
- Previous experience at a database or infrastructure company
Why PlanetScale
We're redefining how high-growth companies manage data at scale. We work with some of the most exciting brands in gaming, consumer tech, and B2B SaaS. As a Developer Educator, you'll be at the core of educating our customers to effectively use the platform that powers world-class apps used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. PlanetScale's hiring philosophy is centered around building small teams of p99 individuals.
At PlanetScale we believe in supporting people to do their best work. We strive to build an environment where people feel that they are respected and valued, whether they are a candidate or an employee.
Total Compensation and Pay Transparency
An employee's total compensation consists of base salary + variable comp where appropriate + benefits + equity. A member of our Talent Acquisition team will be happy to answer any further questions when we engage with you to begin the interview process.
Base salary range: $130,000 – $200,000 USD
To apply: https://weworkremotely.com/remote-jobs/planetscale-developer-educator
Frequently Asked Questions
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