Staff Database Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Manage the daily reliability and operational health of Chaturbate’s PostgreSQL environment.

• Proactively identify and resolve database reliability, performance, and scalability issues.

• Enhance capabilities for high availability, replication, backup, restore, and disaster recovery.

• Lead responses to database incidents and implement preventative measures for improvements.

• Strategically plan and carry out PostgreSQL upgrades, migrations, and maintenance with minimal disruption.

• Monitor and optimize performance across high-volume, latency-sensitive, and high-write workloads.

• Collaborate with SRE to build observability, alerting, automation, and operational runbooks.

• Anticipate growth in data volume, storage, compute, WAL generation, replication bandwidth, and latency.

• Assess database architecture, schema design, queries, migrations, scalability, and operational risks for new products.

• Establish PostgreSQL operational standards, automation, and best practices.

• Document the environment and enhance SRE PostgreSQL knowledge.

• Engage in an on-call rotation for critical database incidents.

• Analyze query execution plans, indexing, autovacuum, table bloat, checkpoint tuning, and storage efficiency.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of hands-on experience managing PostgreSQL in large-scale, mission-critical production environments.

• In-depth knowledge of PostgreSQL reliability, replication, failover, backup, recovery, and high availability.

• Proven experience in preventing, diagnosing, and resolving complex production database incidents.

• Familiarity with planning and executing PostgreSQL upgrades, migrations, and maintenance safely.

• Strong understanding of PostgreSQL internals, including WAL, autovacuum, indexing, locking, query planning, and connection management.

• Experience supporting high-volume workloads, large datasets, or rapidly growing databases.

• Solid knowledge of Linux and an understanding of how infrastructure impacts database performance and reliability.

• Capability to automate operational tasks through scripting, configuration management, or infrastructure tooling.

• Experience in developing monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and incident-response protocols.

• Excellent communication skills and sound judgment to collaborate effectively with SRE and product engineering teams.

• Nice to have: Familiarity with Patroni, PgBouncer, or similar PostgreSQL high-availability and connection-pooling technologies.

• Nice to have: Experience in designing or testing multi-region database recovery strategies.

• Nice to have: Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, and modern observability platforms.

• Nice to have: Experience in building PostgreSQL operational knowledge within an SRE or infrastructure organization.

• Nice to have: Background in supporting high-traffic consumer platforms, real-time systems, or revenue-critical transaction flows.

• Nice to have: Experience with the Python Django web framework.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive base salary.

• Option for fully remote work.

• Comprehensive health, vision, dental, and life insurance for you and your dependents, with policy premiums covered by the company.

• Long and short-term disability insurance.

• Unlimited paid time off (PTO).

• Annual year-end company closure.

• Optional 401(k) plan with 5% matching.

• 12 paid holidays.

• Paid lunches in-office, or a $125/week stipend via Sharebite if remote.

• Employee assistance and recognition programs.