Senior Database Engineer

Accountabilities:

The Senior Database Engineer will own database performance and reliability initiatives while serving as a trusted technical partner to engineering teams and contributing to continuous operational improvement.

• Investigate database performance bottlenecks and reliability risks using instrumentation, code reviews, and staging tests.
• Identify and resolve slow queries, inefficient or missing indexes, schema issues, and database configuration challenges.
• Diagnose distributed database issues including transaction contention, retries, hot ranges, and inefficient access patterns, partnering with application engineers on root-cause fixes.
• Establish performance baselines and monitoring practices to identify meaningful changes in workload behavior early.
• Advise engineering teams on the risks and trade-offs associated with schema migrations, access patterns, configuration changes, and other database modifications.
• Participate in design reviews and provide guidance on schema design, primary key selection, indexing, and transaction boundaries.
• Contribute database expertise to incident response and root-cause analysis, translating lessons learned into sustainable improvements.
• Develop safer migration procedures, documentation, and technical guidance that enable engineering teams to evolve data models effectively.
• Own operational practices including database version upgrades, backup and recovery validation, cluster settings, capacity planning, and sizing.
• Improve database observability across latency, retries, contention, range health, capacity, and other critical production signals.
• Collaborate with the managed database provider as a knowledgeable technical counterpart and help optimize the database footprint as the platform grows.
• Work closely with infrastructure, platform, and application engineering teams to improve database availability and performance.
• Mentor engineers on database troubleshooting, performance optimization, and distributed database concepts.

Requirements:

The ideal candidate brings extensive production database experience, strong distributed-systems knowledge, and the ability to communicate complex technical trade-offs clearly while working independently and collaboratively.

• 5+ years of experience in a role where operating and optimizing production databases was a primary responsibility.
• Deep hands-on experience managing distributed databases, including performance and high-availability behavior.
• Hands-on experience managing relational databases supporting business-critical production systems.
• Proven ability to diagnose database inefficiencies and deliver measurable improvements across queries, indexing, schemas, or configuration.
• Strong SQL skills and fluency with execution plans, transaction management, and distributed SQL concepts including replication, consistency, consensus, and distributed transactions.
• Ability to evaluate database-change risks and clearly communicate technical trade-offs to engineering teams.
• Strong independent problem-solving skills, with the ability to investigate unfamiliar systems, prioritize issues, and carry improvements through completion.
• Collaborative and considerate working style, particularly when partnering with teams whose work depends on your expertise.
• Production experience administering CockroachDB at meaningful transaction volumes, including contention, transaction retries, and hot-range troubleshooting, is valued.
• PostgreSQL administration experience is valued.
• Experience operating managed database services and working effectively with vendor support and engineering teams.
• Experience with zero- or minimal-downtime schema migrations on large, high-traffic tables.
• Experience supporting payments, fintech, or similarly availability-sensitive platforms is a plus.
• Experience with database capacity planning, cluster sizing, and multi-region topologies.
• Experience building operational tooling or checks with Python, Go, or similar languages.
• Familiarity with ORMs such as Rails ActiveRecord and their influence on database access patterns.
• Cloud experience with AWS or Azure is valued; database-focused cloud certifications are a plus.
• CockroachDB or PostgreSQL experience is not mandatory when equivalent depth in distributed database management is demonstrated.
• Ability to work legally in the United States without current or future employment sponsorship.
• Remote employees must be based in an eligible U.S. location; New York is currently not supported.
• Successful finalist candidates must complete a background and reference check.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary plus equity.
• Outstanding medical and dental benefits, including a 100% employer-paid option.
• Company-paid life and disability insurance.
• Optional vision and supplemental insurance plans.
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options.
• Open Paid Time Off policy.
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave for new parents.
• Matching 401(k) plan at 5% up to $5,000 annually.
• $1,000 annual professional development stipend.
• Monthly home-working and digital lifestyle stipend.
• New MacBook and one-time accessory reimbursement.
• Company-paid professional coaching services.
• Opportunities for remote employees to visit the headquarters in Durham, North Carolina.
• Opportunity to influence database reliability and engineering practices within a high-scale payments environment.
• Highly autonomous, collaborative environment with broad technical ownership.
• Culture emphasizing transparency, curiosity, courageous collaboration, simplicity, and self-driven leadership.
• Support for thoughtful and ethical use of modern AI tools to enhance productivity and impact.