Staff Datebase Engineer

Owner

$125K — $150K *
US-Anywhere
+ 2 other locationsRemote
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Hands-on experience with OLTP access patterns, indexing, query optimization, and schema design in user-facing applications.
  • Proficient in coding within the product stack while having a strong understanding of the database layer.
  • Expertise with major relational databases, preferably Postgres, in high-volume production scenarios; workload migration experience is a plus.
  • Skilled in schema design, indexing, and zero-downtime migrations on large, live tables.
  • Experience managing systems growth under significant traffic and data increases; background in advertising analytics, fintech, consumer SaaS, or marketplaces.
  • Strong software engineering skills; able to write, review, and ship production code, not just SQL.
  • Excellent problem-solving abilities with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.

Responsibilities

  • Lead the migration of product workloads to improved data infrastructures.
  • Provide guidance on optimal data storage and access patterns for product engineers.
  • Build reusable data utilities and best practices for development teams to avoid redundancy.
  • Expand the data platform to incorporate caching, search, and event streaming capabilities.
  • Collaborate across product engineering and infrastructure teams for company-wide initiatives.
  • Drive the implementation of load-bearing changes to the data infrastructure.

Benefits

  • 100% remote work opportunity within the U.S., Canada, Mexico, or Colombia.
  • Engagement in impactful, large-scale projects that influence multiple product teams.
  • Opportunity to work closely with cross-functional engineering teams and drive significant infrastructure improvements.
  • A role focused on development and engineering rather than business intelligence or analytics.
Full Job Description
We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Database Engineer to help product teams store and access data effectively at scale. You will be the default place product engineers turn to for "which database should this live in?" and "will this access pattern hold up?" This means leading large projects like migrations and building the platform engineers interact with. You will be driving the largest, load-bearing changes to our data infrastructure. This is a hands-on, software-engineer-first role. It is not a BI, data-warehousing, or analytics-engineering role - that work lives with our BizOps and BI teams. This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada, or anywhere in Mexico or Colombia. The impact you'll have 3 Lead the migration of product workloads 3 Give product engineers a clear home for "where should this data live and how should I access it?" 3 Build reusable primitives - data-sync utilities, ORM best practices, and access-pattern / schema / index review - so teams stop reinventing patterns. 3 Expand the product-data platform over time into caching, search, and event streaming. Who you'll work with 3 Product Engineering Teams 3 Platform / Infrastructure Teams 3 This role has company-wide impact and will partner cross-functionally across the entire engineering organization. What we're looking for 3 Hands-on experience working with databases inside the product - owning OLTP access patterns, indexing, query optimization, and schema design as part of building user-facing applications 3 Comfortable both writing code in the product stack and reasoning carefully at the database layer 3 Deep expertise with a major relational engine (Postgres strongly preferred) in high-volume production; experience migrating workloads (e.g., MongoDB 12 Postgres) a strong plus 3 Expertise in schema design, indexing, query optimization, and zero-downtime migrations on large, live tables 3 Experience scaling systems through significant traffic and data growth, in a domain where understanding access patterns at scale is a survival skill - e.g. advertising analytics, fintech / trading systems, large-scale consumer SaaS, or marketplaces 3 Strong software engineering ability - writes, reviews, and ships production code, not SQL alone 3 Flexible problem solving 3 Strong written and verbal communication skills 3 Deep sense of personal ownership and accountability 3 Builder mentality Nice to Haves 3 Experience building shared platform primitives - data-sync tooling, ORM best practices, caching (Redis), search, or queues / event streaming 3 Experience with payments or financial data 3 Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and observability/performance tooling

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