Sr. Database Engineer

Description

The company is hiring a Senior Database Engineer to own the design, performance, and operational health of the relational data platform behind its mobility products.

This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role covering schema architecture, migration safety, query performance, and data durability on a high-volume, multi-tenant transaction platform on AWS.

You will work with software, platform and DevOps engineers, and architects, alongside Product, QE, and Information Security, supporting hundreds of microservices that share operational data stores.

Success means faster queries and transactions, safe and regular schema changes, data durability against recovery targets, and retiring data-access patterns that limit scale.

In the first 90 days you will learn the core schema, migration pipeline, and environment setup, take over the migration review process, and hold a prioritized list of the costliest queries.

By 6 months you should have reduced latency on your workloads, tested backup and recovery against stated targets with a real restore, and joined the on-call rotation.

By 9 months you should be recognized as the owner of data architecture, have removed at least one major constraint such as a legacy data dependency, a licensing exposure, or a recurring performance failure, and be mentoring engineers and setting team standards.

The company values ownership and high performance, acting with integrity and courage, and growing people through collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Be accountable for the relational schema of the core platform, including entity modeling, normalization, constraints, indexes, and versioned reference and seed data.
• Write and review migrations as code that stay backward compatible and avoid downtime, using expand/contract, dual-write, and backfill-then-cut so schema and application releases are independent.
• Keep migration history as the single source of truth for applied state in every environment and tenant, detecting and reconciling drift.
• Set and enforce rules for constraints, foreign keys, nullability, and uniqueness so the database, not application code, guarantees integrity.
• Profile and tune high-volume OLTP workloads, covering plans, indexes, partitioning, statistics, connection pooling, vacuum, and autovacuum.
• Find and fix latency and timeout issues across the stack, including client timeout settings, retry storms, N+1 queries, and repeated plan regeneration.
• Set query performance budgets and regression checks so problems surface before release.
• Review transactions, isolation levels, and locking, adding explicit row locks where read-then-write races could cause duplicate or conflicting work.
• Lead the move of data access away from generated API layers and ad-hoc SQL in application code, toward typed, reusable domain services with clear ownership.
• Reduce third-party data-layer dependencies and licensing exposure by replacing them at the infrastructure layer, one environment at a time, without changing application behavior.
• Help move customer records off legacy platforms: mapping, transformation, loading, and reconciliation checked against the original system's counts and balances.
• Work with Architecture to split transactional and analytical workloads, reporting replicas, and data warehouse feeds.
• Own backup, point-in-time recovery, replication, and failover, and verify them with real restore tests.
• Ensure recovery settings meet contractual RPO and RTO commitments and keep the evidence.
• Build database monitoring for wait events, slow queries, replication lag, connection saturation, and storage and IOPS headroom, and define SLIs for the data tier.
• Join on-call rotations, respond to data-tier incidents, contribute to root-cause analysis, and drive corrective actions to completion.
• Implement encryption at rest and in transit, key management, and least-privilege access, and replace shared and long-lived credentials with managed identity and short-lived tokens.
• Protect regulated and personal data, including vehicle, registered-owner, and payment data, with access controls, masking outside production, and defined retention and purge.
• Help software teams adopt approved data-access patterns, migration tooling, and performance review from the start.
• Review application data access in code review and coach engineers on query construction, indexing, and transaction scope.
• Document schema ownership, data dictionaries, runbooks, and recovery procedures so that knowledge is not held by one person.
• Handle high-priority incident calls and support urgent work outside standard hours when needed.

Requirements

• Required: a bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Required: 6+ years in database engineering, data platform engineering, or production DBA work, including 3+ years on PostgreSQL at production scale.
• Required: strong PostgreSQL skills in plan analysis, index and partition design, autovacuum and bloat control, connection pooling, and diagnosing locks and deadlocks.
• Required: production experience with managed cloud databases, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL or RDS preferred, including backup, point-in-time recovery, read replicas, and failover testing.
• Required: hands-on use of migration tools in CI/CD such as Flyway, Liquibase, Alembic, Sqitch, or similar, plus zero-downtime change patterns.
• Required: solid grasp of isolation, locking, and concurrency, and the ability to spot race conditions in application code, not just in the database.
• Required: advanced SQL and at least one of Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, or Bash for tooling and automation.
• Required: working experience changing database infrastructure as code with CloudFormation, Terraform, or similar.
• Required: experience with database observability tools such as Performance Insights, pg_stat_statements, CloudWatch, Datadog, or a comparable APM.
• Required: clear written and spoken communication, able to explain data-tier trade-offs to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Preferred: experience in mobility, transportation, tolling, parking, payments, or other regulated high-volume transaction environments.
• Preferred: experience with GraphQL data-access layers such as Hasura or PostGraphile, and with moving applications off a generated API onto typed service interfaces.
• Preferred: multi-tenant data architecture at scale, including per-tenant account or database isolation and its operational overhead.
• Preferred: event streaming and change data capture with Apache Kafka, Amazon MSK, Debezium, or transactional outbox patterns, and their consistency guarantees.
• Preferred: large-scale legacy migrations with formal reconciliation and cutover planning.
• Preferred: exposure to compliance regimes such as SOX, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, or ISO 27001.
• Preferred: analytical platforms such as Redshift, Snowflake, or dbt, and transactional-to-analytical replication.
• Preferred: working familiarity with Oracle or SQL Server for legacy interoperability.
• Preferred: AWS Certified Database Specialty, AWS Solutions Architect, or a PostgreSQL certification.

Conditions

Participation in an on-call rotation, with emergency work outside standard hours as needed.

Hours include incident response and occasional urgent activity beyond the normal workday.