Staff Database Engineer

We're seeking an experienced Staff Database Engineer to lead the stability and operational excellence of our PostgreSQL platform. This position is responsible for ensuring our database infrastructure remains highly available, resilient, and capable of supporting mission-critical applications at scale. Responsibilities Take ownership of the health, availability, and performance of the organization's PostgreSQL infrastructure. Continuously evaluate the environment to identify reliability, scalability, and performance concerns before they impact production systems. Improve database resiliency by enhancing replication strategies, backup processes, disaster recovery planning, and failover capabilities. Lead troubleshooting efforts during database outages or performance incidents while implementing long-term corrective actions. Coordinate PostgreSQL upgrades, maintenance activities, and migrations with minimal customer impact. Optimize database performance across large-scale transactional environments by analyzing query execution, indexing strategies, locking behavior, storage utilization, autovacuum performance, and checkpoint tuning. Build and enhance monitoring, alerting, dashboards, automation, and operational documentation alongside the SRE team. Establish database operational standards, documentation, and automation that improve consistency across engineering teams. Mentor teammates by sharing PostgreSQL operational knowledge and contributing to internal documentation. Participate in an on-call rotation supporting critical production database systems. Qualifications Required 8+ years of experience managing PostgreSQL in large-scale production environments supporting business-critical applications. Extensive expertise in PostgreSQL replication, high availability, failover strategies, backup and recovery processes, and disaster recovery planning. Proven experience diagnosing and resolving complex database performance issues and production incidents. Strong background planning and executing PostgreSQL upgrades, migrations, and maintenance with minimal downtime. In-depth understanding of PostgreSQL internals, including WAL, autovacuum, indexing, query optimization, locking mechanisms, connection management, and execution planning. Experience supporting high-throughput systems with large datasets and rapidly growing database environments. Solid Linux administration skills and a strong understanding of how infrastructure impacts database performance and reliability. Experience automating operational tasks using scripting languages, infrastructure automation, or configuration management tools. Hands-on experience implementing monitoring, alerting, operational documentation, and incident response procedures. Excellent communication skills with the ability to collaborate effectively across infrastructure, SRE, and software engineering teams. Preferred Experience Experience with PostgreSQL high-availability technologies such as Patroni, PgBouncer, or comparable solutions. Familiarity with multi-region replication and disaster recovery architecture. Experience using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), configuration management platforms, and modern observability tools. Previous experience building PostgreSQL operational processes and best practices within an SRE or infrastructure-focused organization. Background supporting high-volume consumer applications, real-time platforms, or transaction-intensive systems. Exposure to Python and the Django framework.