Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer

tastylive • Chicago, IL

18h • $150,000 - $180,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer, you'll own the health, performance, and durability of high-throughput Postgres clusters running both on bare metal / on-prem VMs and on Amazon RDS. This is a hands-on role: you will read query plans, tune indexes, run failover drills, review application code, and write high-quality documentation. This is not a ticket-queue DBA position. You will work inside the development process — reviewing migrations before they ship, pairing with application teams on data access patterns, assisting with performance troubleshooting, and contributing to incident resolution and process improvement.

Requirements

• Deep PostgreSQL expertise with the query planner — you can read EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) output and explain why the planner chose a plan, not just that it was slow.
• Hands-on indexing strategy experience across B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN, partial, expression, and covering indexes, including the write-amplification cost of each.
• Understand replication — physical and logical replication, replication slots, lag diagnosis, and the failure modes of each.
• Production experience with Patroni-managed clusters, including having handled a real failover.
• Proven ownership of a backup and restore program (pgBackRest, Barman) — including having performed a production restore under pressure.
• Experience operating Postgres at meaningful scale in both self-managed (on-prem/VM/bare metal) and managed RDS environments.
• Strong Linux fundamentals: filesystem and I/O behavior, memory and hugepages, systemd, networking, and performance tooling.
• Software development background: creating, reviewing, and merging pull requests as part of a mandatory peer review process, and writing runbooks and design documentation.
• Working proficiency in Ruby and Java, with enough Python literacy to read, review, and modify it confidently.
• Excellent written communicator. Clear incident summaries, review comments, and design proposals are a core part of this job, not an afterthought.
• Excellent documentation practice — a demonstrated habit of leaving systems better documented than you found them.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with connection poolers (PgBouncer) at scale.
• Infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (Terraform, Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, etc.).
• Kubernetes-hosted Postgres operators.
• Active-active multi-site architecture.
• Experience with logical replication–based zero-downtime migrations.
• Contributions to Postgres or its ecosystem tooling.
• Familiarity with our internal tooling, including [gascan].

Responsibilities

• Own performance for high-volume OLTP Postgres workloads: query plan analysis, index strategy, statistics and autovacuum tuning, connection pooling, partitioning, and schema design review.
• Design, deploy, and operate highly available clusters using Patroni, including replication topology, failover and switchover procedures, and regular testing.
• Own the backup and recovery program end to end — backup tooling, retention, PITR, and, most importantly, routine restore verification with documented RTO/RPO.
• Manage Postgres in both on-prem and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL environments, including the operational differences between them (parameter groups, extension availability, failover behavior, upgrade paths).
• Plan and execute major-version upgrades and large migrations with minimal downtime.
• Review application code and database migrations written in Ruby (Rails/ActiveRecord) and Java (JDBC), catching N+1 queries, unsafe DDL, missing indexes, and lock-taking migrations before they reach production.
• Build and maintain observability for the database tier: metrics, slow query capture, lock and wait-event analysis, and capacity forecasting.
• Automate routine operations. Manual runbooks are a starting point, not a destination.
• Participate in an on-call rotation: lead incident response, write postmortems, and file follow-up tickets to prevent recurrence.
• Write and maintain internal documentation: runbooks, architecture decision records, upgrade playbooks, and developer-facing guidance on using Postgres well.
• Assist in sizing and future scaling of on-prem server hardware.
• Participate in disaster recovery planning and exercises.

Benefits

• Performance Bonuses
• Stock Purchase Options
• Medical/Vision/Dental Benefits
• 401k Plan
• 20 Paid Vacation Days (plus an additional paid vacation day the month of your birthday!)
• 10 Paid Sick Days
• Gym Membership Reimbursement
• Commuter Benefits
• Pet Insurance
• Wellness & Mental Health Programs
• Charitable Donation Matching
• Two Paid Volunteer Days Off
• Daily catered lunch when in the office
• Full kitchen with snacks and beverages
• In-building gym
• Shuttle to/from Metra

What This Job Offers

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