PostgreSQL Database Administrator (Production DBA)

Centric Software • Toronto, ON

3d • Remote

About The Position

Centric Software is seeking a PostgreSQL expert to join their R&D Customer Support team as a Production DBA. This role is focused on bringing deep Postgres expertise in-house to analyze, troubleshoot, and improve production database environments, perform root cause analysis on issues ranging from long-running queries to hosting environment problems and heavy traffic scenarios, and ensure customers’ PostgreSQL deployments remain healthy, performant, and reliable. The DBA will also work across development environments as needed to trace issues to their source and collaborate with engineering on fixes.

Requirements

• Minimum 5 years of hands-on experience as a PostgreSQL DBA, with deep knowledge of Postgres internals (MVCC, WAL, query planner, locking, buffer management) and operational best practices.
• Proven track record managing PostgreSQL in production environments, including incident response, root cause analysis, and performance optimization under heavy traffic.
• Strong SQL skills, including query optimization and execution-plan analysis (EXPLAIN / EXPLAIN ANALYZE).
• Experience with PostgreSQL performance tuning: indexing strategies, autovacuum, connection pooling (PgBouncer), and configuration tuning (postgresql.conf).
• Experience with high availability and replication: streaming replication, logical replication, Patroni, or equivalent.
• Experience with backup and recovery tooling such as pgBackRest, WAL-G, pg_basebackup, or Barman.
• Proficiency with Linux/Unix operating systems and shell scripting (Bash or similar).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex database concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Located in North America with the ability to work core hours that overlap with the team.

Nice To Haves

• Experience supporting PostgreSQL on AWS RDS, Aurora Postgres, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, or Google Cloud SQL.
• Scripting or automation experience in Python, PowerShell, or similar.
• Familiarity with monitoring/observability tooling (Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, pganalyze, Sentry).
• Experience working in a customer-facing or customer-support-adjacent role.
• Exposure to additional database platforms (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB) and migration experience to/from Postgres.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and containerized workloads (Kubernetes).

Responsibilities

• Serve as the PostgreSQL expert and primary Production DBA within the R&D Customer Support team, driving the stability, performance, and reliability of customer-facing database environments.
• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) on production incidents spanning query performance, database configuration, infrastructure-level bottlenecks, and traffic/load conditions.
• Diagnose and resolve complex PostgreSQL performance, availability, and data-integrity issues, including query tuning, index strategy, vacuum/auto vacuum behavior, and lock contention.
• Troubleshoot and analyze production PostgreSQL systems across diverse hosting environments, ensuring performance, availability, and data integrity.
• Review execution plans, analyze slow queries, and recommend configuration, schema, or indexing changes to optimize production workloads.
• Support customers running PostgreSQL across on-premises, cloud (AWS RDS/Aurora, Azure, GCP), and self-managed deployments.
• Work across development and production environments to trace issues to their source and collaborate with engineering on fixes and product improvements.
• Advise on high-availability and disaster-recovery architectures including streaming replication, logical replication, failover, backup/restore (pg_basebackup, pgBackRest, WAL-G), and point-in-time recovery.
• Create and maintain internal knowledge-based articles, runbooks, and best-practice documentation for the support team.
• Mentor support engineers and developers on Postgres internals, SQL tuning, and operational best practices.
• Participate in on-call rotation for critical customer escalations as needed.

Benefits

• Equal employment opportunities

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed