Senior Database Engineer

Accountabilities:: The Senior Database Engineer will own database performance and reliability initiatives while serving as a trusted technical partner to engineering teams and contributing to continuous operational improvement. Investigate database performance bottlenecks and reliability risks using instrumentation, code reviews, and staging tests. Identify and resolve slow queries, inefficient or missing indexes, schema issues, and database configuration challenges. Diagnose distributed database issues including transaction contention, retries, hot ranges, and inefficient access patterns, partnering with application engineers on root-cause fixes. Establish performance baselines and monitoring practices to identify meaningful changes in workload behavior early. Advise engineering teams on the risks and trade-offs associated with schema migrations, access patterns, configuration changes, and other database modifications. Participate in design reviews and provide guidance on schema design, primary key selection, indexing, and transaction boundaries. Contribute database expertise to incident response and root-cause analysis, translating lessons learned into sustainable improvements. Develop safer migration procedures, documentation, and technical guidance that enable engineering teams to evolve data models effectively. Own operational practices including database version upgrades, backup and recovery validation, cluster settings, capacity planning, and sizing. Improve database observability across latency, retries, contention, range health, capacity, and other critical production signals. Collaborate with the managed database provider as a knowledgeable technical counterpart and help optimize the database footprint as the platform grows. Work closely with infrastructure, platform, and application engineering teams to improve database availability and performance. Mentor engineers on database troubleshooting, performance optimization, and distributed database concepts. Requirements: 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. Benefits: Competitive salary plus equity. Outstanding medical and dental benefits, including a 100% employer-paid option. Company-paid life and disability insurance. Optional vision and supplemental insurance plans. Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options. Open Paid Time Off policy. 12 weeks of paid parental leave for new parents. Matching 401(k) plan at 5% up to $5,000 annually. $1,000 annual professional development stipend. Monthly home-working and digital lifestyle stipend. New MacBook and one-time accessory reimbursement. Company-paid professional coaching services. Opportunities for remote employees to visit the headquarters in Durham, North Carolina. Opportunity to influence database reliability and engineering practices within a high-scale payments environment. Highly autonomous, collaborative environment with broad technical ownership. Culture emphasizing transparency, curiosity, courageous collaboration, simplicity, and self-driven leadership. Support for thoughtful and ethical use of modern AI tools to enhance productivity and impact.