Staff Database Engineer

About Us: Prime Insights is a Sweden-based technology company reaching millions of diverse users through our proprietary Market Research Panel. Our innovative technology supports our international community and gives our members a world-class survey taking experience. Our mission is to match our authentic members to our client's market research surveys which allows our clients to achieve meaningful insights from the sample we deliver via online quantitative research. Members are rewarded with meaningful incentives, ensuring their sincere participation.

Your Role: As our first in-house Staff Database Engineer, you will own the Data area within Core Engineering—the team that runs our infrastructure, security, and data across all products. Reporting to the CTO of Tech and working day-to-day with the Core Engineering Team Lead and Tech Lead, you will take end-to-end ownership of our transactional and analytics data stores. MariaDB is the heart of the job, running our production clusters under sustained load with a proactive approach: catching issues before they reach users and fixing root causes. Beyond MariaDB, you will shape our data architecture, topologies, ClickHouse, dbt, Airbyte, and CDC pipelines, ensuring data flows safely, fast, and reliably across the organization.

Your Responsibilities:

• Production MariaDB Ownership: Own replication topologies, cluster health, failover, capacity planning, upgrades, and configuration tuning to keep our production MariaDB clusters operating smoothly under high load.
• Proactive Monitoring & Alerting: Build monitoring and alerting for slow queries, query volume spikes, replication lag, lock contention, and storage growth; turn recurring incidents into fixed root causes.
• Query & Schema Optimization: Review and optimize queries, indexes, query plans, and schema designs; pair with product squads on complex cases and raise the query-writing bar across engineering.
• Data Protection & Recovery: Own backups and tested restores, point-in-time recovery, and the database side of disaster recovery to ensure complete data safety.
• End-to-End Data Architecture: Define how MariaDB, ClickHouse, and pipelines fit together, shaping MariaDB topology to serve both transactional traffic and downstream data consumers without either hurting the other.
• ClickHouse & Data Modeling: Manage schema and table-engine design, partitioning, ordering keys, and materialized views; build and maintain dbt models that turn raw data into stable, documented tables.
• Data Movement & Pipelines: Run and evolve CDC from MariaDB, Airbyte connectors, event streams, and batch loads into ClickHouse, making every sync observable, recoverable, and cheap to change.
• Schema Standards & Governance: Set standards for MariaDB migrations and ClickHouse dbt models, using views as public interfaces and managing cataloging and lineage in OpenMetadata.

Your Skills:

• 4+ years working with production databases, with at least 2 years as a hands-on MariaDB or MySQL DBA on systems under sustained high load
• Proven track record designing and running replication topologies, handling real failovers, and executing major-version upgrades without drama
• Ability to read query plans fluently and explain query optimization, indexes, and schema design to application engineers
• Hands-on experience running ClickHouse in production, including table-engine/schema design, partitioning, ordering keys, and performance tuning
• Proactive mindset with a track record of identifying potential incidents early, writing down findings, and pushing for root-cause fixes
• Solid scripting and automation skills using Bash, Python, or Go
• Excellent communication and influencing skills in English to set standards across engineering teams without formal authority

Nice to Have:

• Practical experience with dbt
• Exposure to data catalogs and lineage tools (e.g., OpenMetadata, DataHub, or similar)
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or CDC pipelines
• Experience with high-traffic consumer products and handling high-volume data

Our Offer:

• Competitive salary commensurate with your experience and expertise;
• Regular salary reviews to ensure your compensation reflects your contributions;
• Collaborate with an international team on diverse and engaging projects;
• Enjoy a safe and stable work environment with ample opportunities for growth and development;
• AI enablement budget to support innovation and efficiency.

❗Important: We are not considering freelancers or engineers working on multiple projects simultaneously. This is a full-time position for a dedicated professional who’s ready to fully commit to a single product ecosystem and contribute meaningfully to its long-term success.