Senior Software Engineer, Database Systems

Everlaw is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Database Systems to drive the development of our core data infrastructure. As a mid-sized SaaS company experiencing rapid growth, our challenge isn't just storing data—it's designing and writing the code that ensures data is highly available, performant at scale, and ready to power the next generation of AI-driven features.

In this role, you will be a key contributor and software design owner for our databases and storage layer, moving fluidly between low-level performance coding and high-level system architecture. You will spend most of your time designing and writing code to build robust, scalable solutions. You will collaborate closely with a core squad of engineers and provide guidance to engineers across the broader engineering organization to level up their database expertise. You’ll also collaborate with (and learn from) a community of other senior and staff engineers with expertise in search, cloud infrastructure, full stack SaaS application design, data science, and performance.

Note: We value "applied" expertise. We are looking for a software engineer who loves the theory but lives for the practice of building reliable, high-performance production data systems.

At Everlaw, engineering is key to our mission. Our company culture is open and vibrant and we’re committed to the professional growth of our team members, offering an annual learning and development stipend and regular check-ins with managers regarding career goals. If you’re looking for a place that values passion, integrity, thinking big, and a desire to learn, we’d love to hear from you! Think you’re missing some of the skills and are hesitant to apply? We do not believe in the ‘perfect’ candidate and encourage you to apply if you feel you can bring value to our team.

This is a full-time, exempt position located onsite (3 days/week in office) in Oakland, California.

• We want you to feel like part of the team early on! Our onboarding process will integrate you into the company with informative sessions on our product, policies, processes, and team structure and goals. 
• We’re excited for you to learn, grow, and contribute right away! We trust that you’ll bring industry experience and knowledge that will uplift and uplevel the team, but we don’t expect you to know everything on Day 1.

• Architect and Develop Everlaw’s database and storage strategy: Define how our primary transactional databases interface with our coding architecture, caching layers, and analytics data store.
• Develop and Implement Sharding and Replication Systems: Drive the implementation strategy for horizontal scaling, including designing and coding logical partitioning and sharding. You will design multi-region replication strategies and failover mechanisms to ensure high availability. You will build and maintain the internal tooling necessary to monitor and mitigate replication lag and data consistency.
• Engineer Database Performance: Dive deep into database internals, focusing on code-level optimizations to analyze and improve memory management, disk I/O, and query execution plans. You will work directly on schema and index changes, query optimization, and performance tuning.
• Build Migration Tooling for Low-Downtime Operations: Design and develop database migration tooling and strategies for SQL environments to ensure high availability and minimal business interruption.
• Build Observability Systems: Develop and maintain internal tooling to provide deep visibility into database health and bottleneck identification before they impact customers.
• Always be learning: Stay up to date with the industry, evaluating when to adopt emerging technologies versus optimizing our existing stack. You’ll bring back your learnings to the team and how you might apply these to our work.

• You have at least 5 years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3 years of experience in database engineering.
• You have a deep understanding of the storage engines and locking mechanisms of at least one major RDBMS (Postgres or MySQL preferred).
• You have experience with Distributed Systems: Proven track record of managing databases in a cloud environment (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• You are authorized to work in the United States without restrictions. Please note that at this time, Everlaw is not sponsoring employment visas for this role.

• You have practical experience with vector search, including databases such as Weaviate, Chroma, or pgvector) to support embeddings and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) for our AI initiatives.