Staff Database Engineer

About the Opportunity

The organization operates one of the world's most heavily trafficked live streaming platforms, supporting a global network of independent content creators and millions of real-time viewers. It delivers interactive video at scale through complex broadcasting and low-latency streaming infrastructure, providing highly engaging user experiences around the clock.

The Staff Database Engineer will serve as the primary owner of the reliability, availability, and recoverability of a large-scale PostgreSQL environment. This role is responsible for maintaining mission-critical databases that power core user experiences and revenue-generating features. By optimizing performance, scalability, and disaster recovery capabilities, the position plays a vital role in ensuring the platform's operational stability and continued growth.

Responsibilities

• Manage the day-to-day health, reliability, and performance of the PostgreSQL database environment
• Identify and mitigate risks related to database reliability, scalability, and performance
• Improve high availability, replication, backup, restore, and disaster recovery processes
• Lead database incident response efforts and implement long-term preventative improvements
• Plan and execute database upgrades, migrations, and maintenance with minimal service disruption
• Monitor and optimize database performance for high-volume, low-latency workloads
• Develop observability, alerting, automation, and operational documentation in partnership with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams
• Prepare database infrastructure for continued growth in data volume and platform scale
• Review database architecture for new products and engineering initiatives
• Establish operational standards, best practices, and automation for PostgreSQL administration
• Document systems and share PostgreSQL expertise across the engineering organization
• Participate in an on-call rotation for critical database incidents
• Analyze and optimize query execution plans, indexing strategies, autovacuum configuration, checkpoint tuning, and storage efficiency

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience managing large-scale, production PostgreSQL environments
• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL reliability, including replication, failover, backup, and disaster recovery
• Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex database incidents
• Experience planning and executing database upgrades, migrations, and maintenance activities
• Strong understanding of PostgreSQL internals and advanced performance tuning
• Experience supporting high-volume or rapidly growing database environments
• Strong Linux administration skills and understanding of infrastructure impacts on database performance
• Proficiency in scripting and automation for operational tasks
• Experience developing monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and incident response processes
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills

Pay

$195,000–$227,500 USD annual base salary

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance with employer-paid coverage for employees and eligible dependents
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance
• Unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO)
• Annual company-wide year-end closure
• Optional 401(k) plan with 5% employer match
• Twelve paid company holidays
• Complimentary in-office lunches or a $125/week meal stipend for remote employees
• Employee assistance and recognition programs