Staff Platform Database Engineer

Role overview

First-of-its-kind Staff-level position tasked with defining how databases are deployed, managed, scaled, and operated across a rapidly scaling technology organization. The role blends hands-on production engineering with cross-team technical leadership, shaping an opinionated database platform strategy for globally distributed systems.

Responsibilities

- Define and drive the company-wide database platform strategy with a focus on consistency, resiliency, performance, and global availability - Inventory existing database systems, identify high-impact and high-risk environments, and build a prioritized improvement roadmap - Design and implement approaches for replication, high availability, backups, disaster recovery, migrations, and capacity planning - Build production-grade tooling, governance models, and automated guardrails that make best practices easy to adopt - Write production code to support database deployment, management, and reliability systems - Support global scale including availability, latency, EU data residency, and sovereignty requirements - Lead a company-wide database infrastructure initiative, author architectural design documents, and partner across engineering teams - Reduce database-related availability incidents toward zero through better architecture and operating practices

Requirements

- 8+ years building and operating production database and platform infrastructure in modern cloud environments - Strong production experience with PostgreSQL and MySQL - Hands-on experience with replication, high availability, backups and recovery, database migrations, capacity planning, and distributed databases across geographies - Cloud infrastructure experience with AWS and Google Cloud - Strong server-side Linux experience and proficiency programming in Go - Demonstrated Staff-level experience leading complex initiatives and influencing architecture across multiple engineering teams - Ability to evaluate existing systems, identify risk, and translate findings into an opinionated implementation roadmap - Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills

Nice to have

- Deep knowledge of database internals - Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tooling - Running stateful systems on Kubernetes - Building database platforms or self-service infrastructure for internal engineering teams - Experience with database governance, automated policy enforcement, and developer enablement - Applying AI or automation to database operations and infrastructure workflows

Benefits and work setup

- Base salary range of $205,000–$231,000 USD - Flexible, remote-first culture with team meetups and biannual destination summits - Monthly stipend for coworking, phone, and internet costs - Stock options with an extended ten-year exercise window, plus secondary offering participation - 100% covered health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and dependents - Flexible time off - 18 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents