Senior Database Engineer

Spreedly

1d•Remote

About The Position

Spreedly is hiring a Senior Database Engineer to join their Reliability team. This individual will be the primary database expert, focusing on improving the performance and reliability of the existing distributed database environment and assisting engineering teams in making safe database changes. This is a senior individual contributor role where the engineer will be the go-to person for all database-related matters. The role involves shaping how databases are managed and improved, with a focus on workload, schema, queries, settings, capacity, and change management practices within their managed CockroachDB environment. The Reliability team collaborates across application engineering, infrastructure, and platform to enhance monitoring, prevent incidents, and ensure rapid recovery. This is a highly autonomous team focused on continuous improvement, where the engineer can identify problems, propose solutions, and implement them within team priorities. The role directly impacts the reliability of Spreedly's payments platform.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in a role primarily focused on operating and optimizing production databases.
Deep, hands-on experience managing distributed databases, including performance and high-availability behavior.
Hands-on experience managing relational databases supporting business-critical production systems.
A track record of diagnosing database inefficiencies and delivering measurable improvements to queries, indexing, schema, or configuration.
Strong SQL skills and fluency with execution plans, transaction management, and the trade-offs of distributed SQL.
Ability to assess the risk of a database change and clearly explain technical trade-offs to other engineers.
An independent approach to investigating unfamiliar systems, identifying priorities, and completing improvements.
A considerate, collaborative working style with dependent teams.

Nice To Haves

Production experience administering CockroachDB at meaningful transaction volumes.
PostgreSQL administration experience.
Experience operating a managed database service and working effectively with vendor support and engineering teams.
Experience with zero- or minimal-downtime schema migrations on large, high-traffic tables.
Experience supporting payments, financial technology, or similarly availability-sensitive platforms.
Experience with database capacity planning and cluster sizing, including multi-region topologies.
Experience building operational tooling or checks in Python, Go, or similar languages.
Familiarity with how ORMs shape database access patterns.
Cloud experience on AWS or Azure; database-focused cloud certifications are a plus.

Responsibilities

Improve database performance by investigating current setups, identifying bottlenecks and risks using instrumentation, code review, and staging tests.
Find and improve slow-running queries, identify missing or inefficient indexes, and evaluate database settings.
Diagnose distributed-database issues like transaction contention, retries, hot ranges, and inefficient access patterns, and collaborate with application engineers to resolve them.
Establish performance baselines to monitor workload behavior changes.
Act as the database subject-matter expert, helping engineering teams understand risks and trade-offs of database changes.
Participate in design reviews for systems with significant database demands, providing guidance on schema design, primary key selection, indexing, and transaction boundaries.
Contribute database expertise to incident response and root-cause analysis, implementing lasting fixes.
Own database practices by developing safer migration procedures, documentation, and guidance for application teams.
Take ongoing ownership of operational practices, including planning version upgrades, validating backup and recovery, and managing cluster settings and sizing.
Improve database observability to make key signals visible and actionable.
Work with Cockroach Labs as a knowledgeable counterpart on the managed environment and assist with right-sizing the database footprint.
Partner with infrastructure, platform, and application engineers to improve database performance and availability.
Mentor engineers on database troubleshooting, performance, and distributed-database concepts.