Senior Database Administrator

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Florida.

📋 Description

• Manage and enhance multi-region CockroachDB clusters and PostgreSQL instances across production, staging, and development environments.

• Investigate issues related to contention, serialization retries, range hotspots, leaseholder placement, monotonic-key write pressure, and cross-region latency.

• Analyze slow queries, execution plans, optimizer behavior, schemas, and application call paths to improve performance.

• Identify plan regressions and develop safer rollout strategies.

• Evaluate the risks associated with schema changes and backfills, including lock behavior, retry pressure, capacity impact, and rollback strategies.

• Plan for capacity, scaling events, and version upgrades effectively.

• Develop database observability using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Mimir, Loki, and Snowflake.

• Create dashboards, alerts, and SLO tracking linked to both database and application performance.

• Participate in the data-layer on-call rotation, lead incident analyses, and conduct blameless postmortems.

• Develop tools in Go and Python for incident analysis, explain-plan analysis, migration checks, capacity modeling, and runbook generation.

• Automate provisioning, configuration, backup, and recovery processes using Terraform and infrastructure-as-code methodologies.

• Collaborate with platform engineering teams on CI/CD, deployment safety, and change management practices.

• Utilize Claude Code, Codex, and similar AI tools to investigate incidents, generate probes, create runbooks, and develop tooling.

• Assess AI-assisted observability and anomaly detection methods.

• Implement and review access controls, authentication, authorization, and encryption protocols.

• Ensure compliance with data protection, audit logging, and retention standards.

• Create comprehensive database documentation, standards, and reusable patterns.

• Mentor engineers on database principles, distributed systems behavior, and operational best practices.

• Study the internals of CockroachDB and PostgreSQL and share insights with the team.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 5 years of experience operating production relational databases as a DBA, Database Reliability Engineer, or Data Platform Engineer.

• Extensive production experience with PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, or another relational database management system.

• Deep understanding of trade-offs related to isolation, consensus, locality, and query planning.

• Familiarity with MVCC, the Volcano iterator execution model, and cost-based optimizer frameworks such as Cascades.

• Knowledge of indexing strategies and execution plan analysis.

• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including Raft, Paxos, distributed transactions, consistency models, and failure modes.

• Proficient in writing tools and automation scripts in Python or Go.

• Ability to debug and propose solutions for line-of-business code in Java or a similar programming language.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and monitoring/observability tools like Grafana or Datadog.

• UNIX/Linux administration skills with shell scripting abilities.

• Comfortable working in a cloud environment; AWS is preferred, while Azure or GCP are also acceptable.

• Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation.

• Excellent technical communication skills, both written and verbal.

• Ability to collaborate effectively across teams.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and benefits package.

• Flexible vacation policy.

• A hybrid or remote working environment.

• Startup culture supported by a secure, global organization.

• Team events across the US and Europe.

• Employer-sponsored training and attendance at conferences.

• Opportunity to work in an AI-first environment with access to essential tools for success.