Hey! PgDog is a tiny database startup in SF. We’re scaling the world’s most popular database, PostgreSQL. PgDog is in production, used by dozens of companies, large and small. The problem is big, but so is the opportunity, and we’re hiring!
The jack of all trades. Rust, Postgres, infrastructure (you don’t mind Kubernetes too much), networking, distributed systems, and so much more. You’ll build features that will go directly into our customers hands, the day you ship them.
With great power comes great responsibility, of course. You’re meticulous, detail-oriented and are not afraid to take calculated risks. You write tests because you want to make sure the thing works, not to check a box. You’re not afraid to run code in production, on real data; after all, that’s the only way to know something works.
You’ll fix a bug or ship a cool feature. We’ll give it to one of our users or customers to try right away.
You’ll get acquainted with pretty much all of our code. You’ll start coming up with your own bug fixes and features.
You’re designing our roadmap. You’re contributing to everything we’re doing: coding, talking with customers, and even finding us more! Things we badly want to build:
If any of this sounds super hard…well, that’s because it is, on the surface. We’re splitting this up into small, achievable tasks, and shipping them straight to prod!
Mostly digging through the Postgres manual and building a distributed database, from scratch, using first principles (and as many Wikipedia articles as you need). Everything is written in Rust, so that makes it easier, honestly. Type-safe, “fearless concurrency”, and an awesome open source ecosystem where you can find pretty much everything we’ll need.
Time split is going to be something like 30% bug fixes, 60% new features, 10% infra glue. Use as much (or as little) AI as you want. I use Claude a lot, and it’s been pretty helpful overall, especially for debugging what is now over 100k lines of code. 🚀🚀🚀
I did this at Instacart back in 2020. Grew the company 5x in a few months, just by making Postgres do things it wasn’t built for. My key insight: if you make the database you already have just work, people love it. Nobody wants to migrate to Dynamo, seriously.
I’ve been coding in Rust for close to 10 years, even wrote my own web framework for fun. PgDog started as “something to do” while I was unemployed; one year later, it’s mission-critical infra for some pretty serious people, so that’s cool.
PgDog is an application for sharding PostgreSQL. It understands SQL and can distribute queries automatically between databases. It's built for managed databases, like AWS RDS, and doesn't require any changes to application code or schema.
In addition to sharding, PgDog is a load balancer and pooler, so it can act as a replacement for PgBouncer, RDS Proxy, and other Postgres scaling products. It brings the simplicity and performance of HTTP load balancing to the database.
Built from the experience of sharding Postgres at Instacart during peak growth in 2020, PgDog is the answer to the old question: does Postgres scale? It does now.
Salary
$150,000 - $220,000
Equity
1% - 3%
Location
Remote
Experience
3+ years
Investors
Lev Kokotov
Lev Kokotov
LinkedInNo applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.