Senior Engineer - Core MySQL, Database Platform

At Shopify, the Database Platform group owns the data layer that every shop on the platform runs on. The Core MySQL team sits at the centre of that: we own MySQL itself along with everything around it — the backup systems, the routing layer, the proxies and the regional resiliency and failover machinery that decides how Shopify runs across regions and where traffic goes. These are critical services in the most literal sense.

This is a role for someone who is interested in solving hard problems at world class scale. This role has equal parts software engineering and operational level work. You’ll be building and maintaining purpose built software to operate our database fleet as well as implementing performance, cost and resiliency improvements.

What you'll be doing

• Building and maintaining custom software and automation that lets the team operate MySQL at Shopify's scale

• Operating the fleet directly: virtual machine management, configuration and performance tuning for MySQL, capacity work, and resiliency testing.

• Owning the software powering the connection management, the backups and the failover machinery behind Shopify's database platform.

• Planning and executing changes to critical systems where correctness matters more than speed, and being the person who thought through what could go wrong.

• Participating in a shared on-call rotation covering Shopify's database platform

• Growing with the platform as the data layer evolves.

Qualifications

• Solid grounding in infrastructure and large-scale distributed systems, with real production ownership rather than adjacent exposure.

• Genuine software engineering ability — you write and maintain real code, not just scripts, and you will be assessed against Shopify's engineering bar.

• Hands-on operational experience with stateful systems: configuration and performance tuning, capacity planning, failure testing, and incident response.

• Exceptional attention to detail and a demonstrated instinct for de-risking changes to systems where failure is expensive.

• Comfort carrying a pager for critical infrastructure, and the judgement to know when to act and when to escalate.

• Effective use of AI tooling to accelerate your own work and cover gaps.

Bonus points for:

• Deep MySQL experience — the internals, replication, backup and restore, proxying and routing layers.

• Experience with Zookeeper or other similar distributed systems

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform

• Experience operating a large database fleet at a company of similar scale.

At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly—not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you're ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a live pair programming session, come prepared with your own IDE.

This role requires on-call work.

Ready to build the backbone of Shopify? Join the team that's making commerce better for everyone.