PostgreSQL Database Consultant

Bitovi • Chicago, IL

8d • $120,000 - $190,000 • Remote

About The Position

Bitovi is seeking a PostgreSQL Database Consultant to help enterprise clients operate critical data platforms reliably. The role focuses on diagnosing, stabilizing, and tuning large self-managed PostgreSQL environments, especially on-premises systems. The consultant will apply deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals—including MVCC, autovacuum, the query planner, and WAL—to improve production database reliability and performance.

This is a fully remote, full-time position requiring the ability to travel, averaging 3 to 5 days each quarter. The consultant will work directly with clients, investigate production issues, communicate findings and recommendations to engineers and stakeholders, and leave client teams with monitoring, runbooks, and procedures they can maintain. Compensation is $120,000 to $190,000 annually depending on experience, plus an annual bonus opportunity.

Candidates must be located in and authorized to work in the United States. Bitovi is unable to provide visa sponsorship. Employment offers are contingent on passing a background check.

Requirements

• Deep production experience administering PostgreSQL on self-managed, on-premises infrastructure; experience only with 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 selecting index types, 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 with 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 systems, and failover testing.
• Experience with backup, restore, and point-in-time recovery using pgBackRest, Barman, or similar tools, including regular restore validation.
• Experience with connection pooling using PgBouncer or Pgpool-II.
• Experience with PostgreSQL monitoring and alerting using tools such as 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 for work.
• Must be located in and authorized to work in the United States.

Nice To Haves

• Configuration management for database fleets using Ansible or similar tools.
• 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 tools.
• Scripting and automation experience in Python, Bash, or Go.
• Experience with other relational databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, or MySQL.

Responsibilities

• Audit configuration, maintenance, and indexing across enterprise PostgreSQL environments to identify root causes of instability and deliver fixes that reduce incidents.
• Optimize vacuum strategy, indexing, queries, and database configuration for performance and reliability under production load.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and runbooks so database problems are detected early and client teams know how to 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 work, averaging 3 to 5 days every quarter.
• Pursue opportunities to present at conferences, attend and provide training, plan and run meetups or local groups, and create content in areas of expertise.

Benefits

• Annual bonus opportunity
• Flexible hours
• 401(k) matching
• Four weeks of paid time off
• Eight paid holidays
• Health insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Paid maternity leave
• Paid paternity leave
• Short-term disability coverage
• Long-term disability coverage
• Life insurance coverage

What This Job Offers

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