Staff Database Reliability Engineer – PostgreSQL

Stream•Toronto, ON

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Stream powers real-time Chat, Video, Activity Feeds, and AI Moderation for billions of end-users across thousands of apps — from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users, while delivering highly reliable, low-latency services and a great developer experience. We're looking for a hands-on Database Engineer to own PostgreSQL as a production system at Stream. You'll work directly with a small, senior team and be responsible for the performance, reliability, and operability of the databases that store and serve data for Stream's entire real-time platform. This is a deep, hands-on engineering role. You'll spend your time in query plans, storage internals, and the operational realities of running databases under heavy, continuous load — not administering them from a distance. We have 35-40 different DBs (largest one is 15tb), with large writing throughput. To save hosting costs, we plan on migrating from AWS RDS to self-hosted Postgres on Kubernetes. For that, we need help from someone who:

Requirements

Deep PostgreSQL expertise — you understand the internals (MVCC, vacuum and bloat, the query planner, indexing, replication) well enough to debug hard problems and reason from first principles, not from defaults.
Production ownership at scale — you've run Postgres behind high-traffic services with large datasets and high write throughput, and you've felt and fixed the failure modes that come with that.
Self-managed databases — you've operated Postgres yourself (on Kubernetes, bare-metal, or VMs), owning backup, replication, and high availability. Managed services alone aren't enough background for this role.
Sharding and scaling — you've sharded a real Postgres workload, not only table partitioning.
An engineering mindset — you can read and write code, and you connect database behaviour to application access patterns rather than treating the DB in isolation.
Judgement alongside AI tooling — we use AI heavily in our workflows; you should be able to use it well and know when it's wrong. Deep internals knowledge is what lets you tell the difference.

Nice To Haves

Multi-tenant database experience
Experience pushing PostgreSQL beyond conventional relational use (large semi-structured or blob data, flexible query interfaces)
Messaging, social, or other high-write, event-heavy storage backgrounds
Connection pooling, logical replication / CDC, or Postgres-compatible distributed SQL (CockroachDB, Yugabyte)
Open source contributions to database or infrastructure tooling

Responsibilities

Diagnose and resolve performance issues from the query down to the storage engine: indexing strategy, query planning, vacuum and bloat management, and tuning under sustained write load.
Own the operational characteristics of our Postgres fleet, including backup, replication, and high availability as we take on more responsibility for running these systems ourselves.
Work on sharding, partitioning, and the architectural decisions that keep the database performant as data and traffic grow.
Set standards for how we run Postgres.
Collaborate closely with application engineers to connect database behaviour to real access patterns.
Help shape the long-term direction of our data infrastructure.