Location: U.S. (Hybrid or Remote)
Work Environment: Hybrid / Remote, with travel to customer sites as engagements require
About the RoleWe are hiring a Database Engineer to own the data plane patterns our federal programs run on. Rather than administering one program's databases, you will build the database engineering practice that every program inherits: reference schema conventions, replication and recovery patterns proven by real drills, zero-downtime migration tooling, and the security posture that keeps production data stores authorizable inside a FedRAMP boundary. When a new program stands up, its data plane starts from your patterns instead of from scratch.
The role stays hands-on and production-facing. You will operate shared data infrastructure, support program teams running data planes built on your patterns, carry escalation for the hardest database problems across engagements, and represent data posture (residency, retention, encryption, access) in customer-context conversations.
What You'll Do- Own the reference database posture programs adopt: instance design, replication topology, parameter tuning, connection management, query plan health.
- Set and govern schema conventions across programs. Treat schema as an interface other engineers consume, and the conventions as a product they inherit.
- Build the backup, restore, and disaster-recovery patterns as reusable tooling, proven by real recovery drills, not program-by-program improvisation.
- Own database security patterns inside the FedRAMP boundary: encryption at rest and in transit, least-privilege access, audit logging, replicated across engagements.
- Build and maintain zero-downtime migration and schema change tooling program teams use on live traffic.
- Partner with Platform Engineering on the shared infrastructure seam (cluster topology, parameter groups, snapshot policy, monitoring) and with Data Engineering on the production-to-analytics seam.
- Support program teams operating on your patterns, and carry escalation on-call for the data plane across the portfolio.
- Sit in customer-context conversations about data posture (residency, retention, encryption, access) across programs.
What You Need- 5+ years of production database engineering at scale on at least one major relational engine (PostgreSQL preferred; Aurora, MySQL, or Oracle at depth also acceptable).
- Strong query plan literacy; can read EXPLAIN ANALYZE and reason about it without a profiler.
- Production experience with zero-downtime schema migrations on live traffic.
- Production experience with at least one OLAP or analytics store (Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery, ClickHouse).
- Production experience on AWS, particularly RDS / Aurora (PostgreSQL flavor preferred).
- Hands-on experience inside a FedRAMP boundary (Moderate or High).
- Experience building database patterns, tooling, or standards consumed by teams beyond your own (central DBRE / DBA practice experience is directly relevant).
- Familiarity with the database side of an ATO continuous-monitoring cycle.
- Strong customer-facing posture: comfortable explaining data residency, retention, and encryption decisions in front of a customer.
- Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance.
Nice to Have- Hands-on experience with both row-store and column-store engines in the same environment.
- Familiarity with logical replication topologies (Postgres logical replication, AWS DMS) for CDC into an analytics layer.
- Experience with vector storage (pgvector, OpenSearch k-NN, Pinecone) for ML retrieval workloads.
- Experience with database security tooling at federal grade (TDE, Vault, AWS KMS with customer-managed keys).
- PostGIS or other spatial extension experience for geospatial domains.
- Experience operating in IL5, IL6, or JWICS environments.
Clearance RequirementsActive U.S. Government security clearance preferred (Secret minimum for most engagements; TS or TS/SCI required for a subset). Candidates without an active clearance must be able to obtain one. Clearance level will be confirmed at offer.
