Senior Database Engineer

Senior Database Engineer

Experience: Minimum 7+ Years
Employment Type: Full-Time
Work Arrangement: Remote
Seniority Level: Senior

About the Role

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Database Engineer to design, build, secure, optimize, and govern the database infrastructure supporting a complex, multi-tenant SaaS platform.

This is not a traditional Database Administrator position focused primarily on backups, user administration, monitoring, or routine database maintenance.

We are looking for a hands-on database engineer with deep experience designing production-grade database systems for SaaS, cloud, enterprise, or other high-scale software platforms.

The successful candidate must be capable of owning database engineering from architecture and schema design through security, migrations, performance, reliability, data integrity, deployment, and production readiness.

You will work closely with Backend Engineering, DevOps, QA, Security, and Architecture teams and will be expected to demonstrate strong technical judgment rather than simply execute database tickets.

Key ResponsibilitiesDatabase Architecture & Engineering

• Design and maintain scalable relational database architectures for complex SaaS applications.
• Own database schema design, normalization, indexing, constraints, relationships, and data integrity.
• Design database structures capable of supporting multi-tenant applications at scale.
• Translate application and business requirements into technically sound database models.
• Review existing schemas and identify architectural, performance, security, and integrity weaknesses.
• Establish database engineering standards and enforce them across development environments.
• Participate in architectural reviews and challenge unsafe or poorly designed database implementations.

PostgreSQL & Multi-Tenant Data Isolation

• Design and implement secure PostgreSQL database architectures.
• Implement and validate Row-Level Security (RLS) for tenant isolation.
• Design database authorization and privilege models following least-privilege principles.
• Prevent unauthorized cross-tenant data access.
• Validate tenant isolation at both database and application interaction layers.
• Design safe approaches for privileged administrative and system-level database operations.

Candidates whose PostgreSQL experience is limited to installation, backups, basic SQL, or routine administration will not meet the requirements for this position.

Schema Design & Data Integrity

• Build production-quality schemas using appropriate primary keys, foreign keys, unique constraints, check constraints, indexes, and transactional controls.
• Design lifecycle and state-based data models.
• Implement data integrity rules at the appropriate database layer rather than relying entirely on application code.
• Design immutable or append-only data structures where required.
• Handle concurrency, race conditions, locking, idempotency, and transactional consistency.
• Design reliable mappings and relationships between internal and external identifiers.

Database Security

• Implement database security according to least-privilege and zero-trust principles.
• Design secure roles, grants, service identities, and application database permissions.
• Ensure sensitive information is appropriately protected.
• Identify insecure database access patterns and recommend corrective actions.
• Support auditability and traceability requirements.
• Work with Security and DevOps teams on secrets management, encryption, access controls, and environment isolation.

Migrations & Deployment

• Design safe, repeatable, and reversible database migrations.
• Review migration scripts before deployment.
• Develop rollback strategies for database changes.
• Support automated database migrations through CI/CD pipelines.
• Prevent destructive or uncontrolled schema changes.
• Handle schema evolution while maintaining application compatibility and data integrity.
• Support development, staging, and production database environments.

Performance & Scalability

• Diagnose slow queries using query plans and database performance metrics.
• Perform advanced SQL and PostgreSQL performance optimization.
• Design appropriate indexing strategies.
• Identify inefficient queries, locking problems, connection issues, and database bottlenecks.
• Perform capacity planning and support database scaling strategies.
• Optimize database workloads without compromising correctness or security.

Reliability, Backup & Recovery

• Design and validate backup and recovery strategies.
• Support Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR).
• Participate in disaster recovery planning and testing.
• Support replication, failover, and high-availability strategies.
• Define and monitor database health and reliability indicators.
• Ensure recovery procedures are tested rather than assumed to work.

Auditability & Compliance

• Design database structures that support traceable and auditable system activity.
• Support append-only and immutable audit requirements where appropriate.
• Implement appropriate retention, archival, and deletion mechanisms.
• Support technical controls required for enterprise security and compliance programs.
• Produce database evidence required for engineering, QA, security, and architecture reviews.

Required Experience

Applicants must have:

• Minimum 7 years of professional database engineering experience.
• Strong production experience with PostgreSQL.
• Strong SQL skills, including complex queries and performance optimization.
• Demonstrable experience designing database architecture rather than only administering databases.
• Strong experience with relational data modeling and schema design.
• Hands-on experience implementing database security and access-control models.
• Experience with PostgreSQL Row-Level Security or comparable data-isolation mechanisms.
• Experience designing databases for multi-tenant SaaS or complex enterprise applications.
• Experience with database migrations and schema versioning.
• Experience diagnosing and resolving database performance problems.
• Strong understanding of transactions, isolation levels, locking, concurrency, and data consistency.
• Experience with backup, restoration, and disaster-recovery procedures.
• Experience working with cloud-hosted databases.
• Experience working alongside Backend, DevOps, Security, and QA engineering teams.
• Experience with Git-based engineering workflows and CI/CD environments.

Strongly Preferred

Preference will be given to candidates with experience in several of the following:

• Large-scale B2B SaaS platforms
• Multi-tenant enterprise applications
• PostgreSQL at significant production scale
• AWS database services
• Kubernetes-based environments
• Infrastructure as Code
• Database observability and monitoring
• High-availability and replication architectures
• Event-driven systems
• Audit-ledger or immutable data architectures
• Enterprise security and compliance environments
• SOC 2 and/or ISO 27001 technical controls
• Data residency and retention requirements
• High-volume transactional systems

Technical Expectations

You should be comfortable explaining and demonstrating:

• How you would design tenant isolation for a multi-tenant PostgreSQL system.
• How PostgreSQL RLS works and where RLS implementations commonly fail.
• How you would prevent an application service from bypassing database security controls.
• How you approach schema design for systems with complex state transitions.
• How you diagnose a production query that has suddenly become significantly slower.
• How you safely migrate a very large production table without causing unacceptable downtime.
• How you handle concurrent updates to the same business entity.
• How you would investigate suspected cross-tenant data exposure.
• How you validate that backups can actually be restored.
• How you design database changes that can be safely rolled back.

Candidates should expect a technical interview and practical assessment requiring them to explain architecture decisions, analyze database scenarios, review SQL/schema designs, and demonstrate previous hands-on database engineering experience.

Minimum Qualification Screening

Please apply only if you meet the following minimum requirements:

• 6+ years of relevant professional experience
• Advanced PostgreSQL experience
• Strong database architecture and schema-design experience
• Production database performance optimization experience
• Database security and access-control experience
• Experience with production migrations
• Experience supporting cloud-based applications
• Strong understanding of transactional database systems

This position is not suitable for candidates whose experience is primarily limited to database installation, routine administration, backups, monitoring, basic SQL queries, reporting, or help-desk database support.

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for someone who takes ownership of database correctness and does not treat the database as simply a storage layer.

The right candidate should be able to identify architectural risks before they reach production, defend technical decisions with evidence, challenge unsafe implementations, investigate failures independently, and work effectively in a disciplined engineering environment.

You should be comfortable being held accountable for the security, integrity, scalability, recoverability, and technical quality of the database systems you own.

Pay: $1,000,000.00 - $1,500,000.00 per month

Benefits:

• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

Application Question(s):

• How many years of hands-on Database Engineering experience do you have, specifically designing and building production database systems?
• Describe the most complex multi-tenant PostgreSQL database you personally designed. What parts did you own?
• Have you implemented PostgreSQL Row-Level Security (RLS) in production? Briefly explain how you prevented cross-tenant data access.
• Describe one major database performance issue you personally diagnosed and fixed. What was the root cause?
• How have you handled production database migrations, rollback, backup/recovery, and zero/minimal-downtime schema changes?
• If a backend service could bypass RLS or access another tenant’s data, how would you identify the cause and permanently prevent it?

Work Location: Remote