Staff/Principal Database Engineer

Everlaw is looking for a Staff or Principal Database Engineer to serve as the technical cornerstone of our data infrastructure. As a mid-sized SaaS company experiencing rapid growth, our challenge isn't just storing data—it's ensuring that data is highly available, performant at scale, and ready to power the next generation of AI-driven features.

In this role, you will be the in-house expert for our databases and storage layer, moving fluidly between low-level optimizations and high-level architectural design. You will have the autonomy to make high-stakes decisions and the resources to implement the latest advancements in data infrastructure. You will help to drive the work of a core squad of engineers, as well as provide technical guidance to engineers to level up their database expertise across the broader engineering organization. You’ll also collaborate with (and learn from) a community of other staff and principal engineers with industry-leading expertise in search, cloud infrastructure, full stack SaaS application design, data science, and performance. You’ll have regular visibility to, and interactions with, our Chief Technology Officer and other senior leaders at the company.

Note: We value "applied" expertise. We are looking for someone who loves the theory but lives for the practice of keeping production systems running smoothly.

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.

• Design Everlaw’s database and storage strategy: Direct how our primary transactional databases interface with our coding architecture, caching layers, and analytics data store.
• Design for scalability, sharding, and replication: Lead the strategy for horizontal scaling, including logical partitioning and sharding, to support our growing SaaS environment. You’ll own the design of multi-region replication strategies and failover mechanisms to ensure high availability. You’ll build systems to monitor and mitigate replication lag and data consistency.
• Dive deep into database performance tuning: Analyze and optimize database internals, including memory management, disk I/O, and query execution plans.
• Plan for low-downtime migrations: Lead the design and execution of database migration strategies for SQL environments to ensure high availability and minimal business interruption.
• Put observability front and center in our approach: Build and maintain tooling to provide visibility into database health and bottleneck identification before they impact customers.
• Always be learning: Stay at the forefront of 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 10 years of experience in software engineering, with at least 6 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 have a record of Leadership. You have demonstrated you can mentor senior engineers and influence the broader engineering organization’s data culture.

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