Senior Database Engineer

This role serves as the database subject-matter expert within a highly autonomous Reliability team.
You’ll improve the performance, availability, and resilience of a distributed database environment supporting business-critical systems.
The position combines deep technical investigation with close collaboration across application, infrastructure, and platform engineering.
You’ll shape database practices, guide safe changes, and help teams make informed architectural and operational decisions.
Your work will directly influence production reliability in a high-scale payments environment handling significant transaction volumes.
The role offers substantial ownership, with the opportunity to identify problems, design solutions, and drive improvements through completion.
This is a senior individual contributor position with no direct reports and broad technical influence across engineering.

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.