Staff Engineer, Datastores

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

📋 Description

• Develop and implement the multi-year strategy and roadmap for datastores, including PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, caching, and streaming.

• Take ownership of reliability, availability, performance, costs, SLOs, error budgets, and operational standards for production datastores.

• Spearhead the scale-out architecture for the multi-tenant data layer, focusing on partitioning, read scaling, tenant isolation, sharding, tenant placement, and online rebalancing.

• Oversee the migration to a fully managed, highly available PostgreSQL system, ensuring zero data loss and minimal downtime.

• Manage ClickHouse architecture, including table engines, partitioning, ordering keys, materialized views, CDC, and ingestion pipelines.

• Advise product teams on the selection of datastores and data models for OLTP, OLAP, caching, and queuing workloads.

• Establish monitoring, alerting, load testing, capacity models, and proactive performance practices.

• Supervise replication, read/write separation, failover, backup and restore processes, disaster recovery, RPO/RTO targets, and conduct regular drills.

• Implement zero-downtime schema migration practices and migration tooling within CI/CD frameworks.

• Review schema and query designs, create standards and design documents, mentor engineers, and support teams in Billing, Lifecycle, Data & Integrations, and DevEx.

• Ensure encryption, access controls, secrets rotation, tenant isolation, and audit logging are in compliance with SOC 2 Type II and GDPR.

• Leverage AI for migration planning, query optimization, runbook automation, and incident response.

• Engage in on-call duties, releases, CI/CD fixes, general infrastructure tasks, and respond to major datastore incidents.

• Expand the datastore function through hiring, onboarding, and developing operational models.

• Deliver a comprehensive datastore strategy, manage PostgreSQL migrations, prepare for 10x growth, enable scalable analytics, ensure measurable reliability, and provide technical leadership across the company.

⛳️ Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or data platform engineering.

• At least 5 years of experience managing production databases at scale in SaaS environments.

• Proven track record of Staff-level impact, including setting technical direction across multiple teams and leading multi-quarter initiatives.

• Expert-level knowledge of PostgreSQL, covering MVCC, vacuum, WAL, planner, query optimization, EXPLAIN analysis, indexing, partitioning, and replication.

• Hands-on experience with a columnar/OLAP datastore, preferably ClickHouse.

• Demonstrated experience designing and managing horizontally scaled, multi-tenant database architectures and replication topologies in a production setting.

• Experience leading large-scale database migrations with zero data loss and minimal downtime.

• Extensive experience with managed databases on AWS, including RDS, Aurora, and/or serverless PostgreSQL.

• Strong observability skills, including familiarity with CloudWatch, pganalyze, HyperDX, Datadog, or similar tools, and the ability to define and manage SLOs.

• Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code using Terraform/OpenTofu or CloudFormation.

• Experience with connection pooling technologies such as PgBouncer or RDS Proxy.

• Familiarity with schema migration tools like Flyway or Liquibase.

• Strong scripting abilities in Python and Bash.

• Practical experience with AI coding agents and developer tools such as Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or Codex.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

• Team-oriented and hands-on approach to releases, on-call duties, and pipeline work.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• Preferred: Experience with Redis, Memcached, Kafka, Debezium, ClickPipes, MySQL/MariaDB, NoSQL datastores, internal data platforms, SOC 2, GDPR, revenue operations, billing, financial systems, GitLab CI/CD, or open-source database initiatives.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexible remote/hybrid work options available within Canada.

• Comprehensive health, vision, dental, and life insurance coverage.

• Competitive compensation and benefits package.

• Pathways for Staff+ individual contributor roles.

• Opportunities for growth and leadership development.

• Commitment to equal opportunity employment.

• Accommodations provided at any stage of the hiring process.