# Sam Lambert

> Sam Lambert is the CEO and President of PlanetScale, the database company built on Vitess, the MySQL scaling technology that once powered YouTube. A database engineer by trade, he started as GitHub's first DBA in 2013 and spent roughly eight years there, rising to VP of Engineering leading a 350-person infrastructure and platform organization through the era GitHub scaled to tens of millions of users. After a short stint at Facebook working on internet-scale video infrastructure, he joined PlanetScale as an investor and advisor, became Chief Product Officer, and was named CEO in July 2021. He is known for a product philosophy centered on databases that 'just work' and never go down, a bias toward taste and craft, and blunt views on leadership.

- **Role:** CEO & President at PlanetScale
- **Organizations:** PlanetScale, GitHub, Facebook, Sequoia Capital
- **Nationality:** British
- **Known for:** Rose from GitHub's first DBA to VP of Engineering leading a ~350-person infrastructure and platform organization., Named non-founder CEO of PlanetScale within roughly nine months of joining as Chief Product Officer., Led PlanetScale's pivot from hosted Vitess to a developer-experience-focused, horizontally scalable MySQL platform.

## Career timeline

- **2013** — Joins GitHub as its first MySQL database administrator during a period of rapid growth.
- **2013-2015** — Works as MySQL DBA at GitHub, building the infrastructure around the database.
- **2017-2022** — Serves as a Sequoia Scout at Sequoia Capital, evaluating early-stage startups.
- **2018-2020** — VP of Engineering at GitHub, leading infrastructure and platform teams that grew to roughly 350 people; ships work including GitHub Actions.
- **2020** — Director of Video and Traffic Production Engineering at Facebook, working on internet-scale infrastructure.
- **2020** — Joins PlanetScale as Chief Product Officer after investing and advising; leads the pivot from hosted Vitess to a developer-focused MySQL platform.
- **2021** — Named CEO of PlanetScale (announced July 2021); the developer-experience MySQL database launched in May 2021.
- **2025** — Continues leading PlanetScale, shipping products like PlanetScale Metal and speaking on AI and infrastructure (e.g. 'Agents and Infrastructure' at Cursor Compile).

## Achievements

- Rose from GitHub's first DBA to VP of Engineering leading a ~350-person infrastructure and platform organization.
- Named non-founder CEO of PlanetScale within roughly nine months of joining as Chief Product Officer.
- Led PlanetScale's pivot from hosted Vitess to a developer-experience-focused, horizontally scalable MySQL platform.
- Helped drive PlanetScale through a Series C funding round; company raised roughly $105M total including a $50M raise.
- Early investor in developer-infrastructure companies including Vercel, Fly.io, Railway, Graphite and Temporal.
- Served as a Sequoia Scout, backing early-stage startups from 2017 to 2022.

## Latest updates

- **2025-08** — Featured on the WunderGraph 'Good Thing' podcast discussing why infrastructure should just work.
- **2025** — Spoke on 'Agents and Infrastructure' at Cursor Compile, connecting AI agents to database infrastructure.
- **2024-07** — Returned to Software Engineering Daily for an episode on hyperscaling SQL with PlanetScale.

## Links

- Website: https://samlambert.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isamlambert/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/samlambert
- GitHub: https://github.com/samlambert

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/sam-lambert
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-29