PostgreSQL Database Consultant

Bitovi • Chicago, IL

6d • Remote

About The Position

Bitovi is seeking a PostgreSQL Database Consultant to help enterprise clients diagnose, stabilize, and tune large, self-managed PostgreSQL environments. The role focuses on hands-on production database administration, understanding PostgreSQL internals, conducting root cause analysis, and making configuration and maintenance changes that improve reliability and performance. The consultant will work directly with clients, communicate findings and recommendations to engineers and stakeholders, and help client teams maintain systems after an engagement. This is a fully remote, full-time position requiring the ability to travel, averaging 3 to 5 days every quarter. The role may also include presenting at conferences, attending or giving training, organizing meetups or local groups, and creating content related to the consultant’s expertise.

Requirements

• Deep production experience administering PostgreSQL on self-managed, on-premise infrastructure; experience limited to managed services such as RDS or Cloud SQL is not sufficient.
• Expertise in vacuum and autovacuum, including tuning thresholds and cost limits, diagnosing and remediating table and index bloat, and preventing transaction ID wraparound.
• Strong indexing expertise, including choosing among B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN, partial, and covering indexes; identifying missing, unused, and duplicate indexes; and safely rebuilding indexes in production.
• Mastery of PostgreSQL configuration, including memory settings, connection limits, checkpoints, WAL, and planner parameters, with the ability to audit configurations and justify changes.
• Experience analyzing query performance using EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS), pg_stat_statements, and pg_stat_ views.
• Experience with replication and high availability, including streaming and logical replication, Patroni, repmgr, or similar, and failover testing.
• Experience with backup, restore, and point-in-time recovery using pgBackRest, Barman, or similar, including regular restore validation.
• Experience with connection pooling using PgBouncer or Pgpool-II.
• Experience with PostgreSQL monitoring and alerting using Prometheus postgres_exporter, pgwatch, Datadog, or similar.
• Solid Linux administration skills related to database hosts, including storage, filesystems, kernel parameters, and resource contention.
• Incident response and root cause analysis experience, including writing clear postmortems and remediation plans.
• Ability to travel; the role averages 3 to 5 days of travel every quarter.
• Must be located in and authorized to work in the United States; visa sponsorship is not available.

Nice To Haves

• Configuration management for database fleets using Ansible or similar.
• Experience writing runbooks and maintenance procedures that client teams can own after an engagement.
• Capacity planning and performance baselining experience.
• Experience with major version upgrades and schema migrations with minimal downtime.
• Experience working within change management processes in large, regulated enterprises.
• Security hardening experience, including roles and privileges, pg_hba configuration, TLS, and auditing with pgAudit.
• Experience running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes using CloudNativePG, Crunchy Postgres Operator, or similar.
• Scripting and automation experience in Python, Bash, or Go.
• Experience with other relational databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, or MySQL.
• Interest or experience in presenting at conferences, training, meetups, local groups, or creating technical content.

Responsibilities

• Audit configuration, maintenance, and indexing across enterprise PostgreSQL environments to identify causes of instability and deliver fixes that reduce incidents.
• Optimize vacuum strategy, indexing, queries, and PostgreSQL configuration for performance and reliability under production loads.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and runbooks to identify problems early and help client teams respond.
• Consult with clients to build outcome-driven platforms, guide them through the process, identify potential problems and unknowns, and tackle challenges.
• Travel for client or team needs, averaging 3 to 5 days every quarter.
• Participate in opportunities to present at conferences, attend or deliver training, organize meetups or local groups, and create content in areas of expertise.
• Communicate findings and recommendations to engineers, stakeholders, and client teams; write postmortems, remediation plans, runbooks, and maintenance procedures.

Benefits

• Competitive salary of $120,000 to $190,000 annually, depending on experience, plus annual bonus opportunity.
• Completely remote work with flexible hours.
• 401(k) matching.
• Four weeks of paid time off in addition to eight paid holidays.
• Health insurance offerings.
• Dental insurance offerings.
• Vision insurance offerings.
• Paid maternity and paternity leave.
• Short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance coverage.

What This Job Offers

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