Staff Software Engineer, PostgreSQL Specialist

ID.me • Mountain View, VA

1d • $174,000 - $229,000 • Onsite

About The Position

ID.me is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (SDE5) specializing in PostgreSQL to lead the engineering, evolution, and operational excellence of the company’s PostgreSQL-based data platform. The role combines deep database internals expertise with platform software engineering, scaling relational databases across CloudSQL, AlloyDB, and AWS RDS while building developer tooling, safe change deployment pipelines, and automated guardrails for mission-critical identity systems.

As a technical authority on PostgreSQL internals, performance engineering, and safe database evolution, this hands-on role supports the wider engineering organization through automated schema change pipelines, migration linters, and self-service guardrails. The engineer will lead major database engine upgrades, large-scale data migrations, and Change Data Capture initiatives in collaboration with Product Engineering, SRE, Security, and Compliance teams. The position is based in the Mountain View, CA or McLean, VA office and requires full-time in-office attendance.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or graduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of professional software development and data infrastructure experience, including 5+ years working deeply with PostgreSQL in high-volume production environments.
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, including MVCC, vacuuming, locking semantics, query execution plans, indexing structures, WAL, and replication.
• Strong programming proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Go, Python, Ruby, or Java.
• Expert-level SQL and PL/pgSQL.
• Strong understanding of data security, encryption, role-based access control, and compliance requirements in regulated environments such as FedRAMP, NIST, or GDPR.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building software, automation, and CI/CD pipelines for safe database schema changes, migrations, and developer guardrails.
• Experience designing and operating automated database change management and schema migration frameworks, such as Liquibase, Flyway, custom DDL linters, or zero-downtime migration tooling, across a large engineering organization.
• Extensive hands-on experience managing and upgrading managed cloud PostgreSQL platforms at scale, particularly GCP CloudSQL, Google AlloyDB, AWS RDS, or Aurora PostgreSQL.
• Track record planning and executing near-zero-downtime major PostgreSQL version upgrades and multi-terabyte table migrations or normalizations under strict availability SLAs.
• Deep experience with PostgreSQL extensions, custom statistics and diagnostics tooling, logical replication, and CDC pipelines such as Debezium, pglogical, Airbyte, or Pub/Sub/Kafka integrations.
• Experience automating database infrastructure and lifecycle management using Terraform, Kubernetes, or Helm.
• Fluency with AI-assisted engineering tools and workflows for tooling development, query analysis, and migration validation.
• Track record of turning tribal database knowledge into self-service tools, documentation, and paved paths for other engineers.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical escalation point and subject-matter expert on PostgreSQL internals, including MVCC, vacuum and autovacuum tuning, transaction ID wraparound prevention, lock management, WAL and checkpoint behavior, buffer management, query planner and optimizer internals, and table and index bloat remediation.
• Design, build, and maintain automated database schema change management pipelines, including CI/CD workflows, DDL validation, lock and timeout guardrails, and pre-flight migration checks, to enable safe, zero-downtime schema and data changes.
• Architect and execute large-scale data migrations and major version upgrades across PostgreSQL, GCP CloudSQL, AlloyDB, and AWS RDS, accounting for data skew, batching, and index performance.
• Partner with engineering teams to review and optimize high-throughput queries, indexing strategies, partitioning and sharding designs, connection management, and role and permission models.
• Build and enhance PostgreSQL telemetry, statistics collection, query performance monitoring, and alerting to detect lock contention, replication lag, slow queries, and capacity bottlenecks before they affect production SLAs.
• Design and maintain reliable Change Data Capture, logical replication, and outbox or streaming integrations between transactional PostgreSQL databases and the broader event-driven and analytical data ecosystem.
• Build automated workflows and enforcement mechanisms for database access controls, cross-schema permissions, secret rotation, data retention and pruning, and regulatory compliance.
• Establish PostgreSQL best practices, conduct architectural and high-risk migration reviews, and mentor engineers to broaden database expertise across the company.
• Build software, automation, and CI/CD pipelines for safe database schema changes, migrations, and developer guardrails.
• Automate database infrastructure and lifecycle management using tools such as Terraform, Kubernetes, or Helm.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Health savings account
• Flexible spending accounts, including medical, limited purpose, dependent care, and commuter benefit accounts
• Basic and voluntary life and AD&D insurance
• 401(k) with company match
• Parental leave
• Unlimited paid time off, subject to the PTO policy
• Eight company-wide holidays
• Short- and long-term disability insurance
• Accident and critical illness insurance
• Referral bonus policy
• Employee assistance program
• Pet insurance
• Travel assistant program
• Wellbeing and childcare discounts
• Benefit advocates
• Learning and development benefit

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior