Staff Software Engineer, PostgreSQL Specialist
About The Position
ID.me is seeking a Staff Software Engineer specializing in PostgreSQL to lead the engineering, evolution, and operational excellence of its PostgreSQL-based data platform. The role combines deep database internals expertise with platform software engineering, focusing on scaling relational databases across CloudSQL, AlloyDB, and AWS RDS and building developer tools, 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, the engineer will tune and operate high-scale databases and build automated schema-change pipelines, migration linters, and self-service guardrails. The role also leads database engine upgrades, large-scale data migrations, and Change Data Capture initiatives in partnership with Product Engineering, SRE, Security, and Compliance teams. It is a hands-on technical position based in the Mountain View, California, or McLean, Virginia, office, with full-time in-office attendance required.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or graduate degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- At least 8 years of professional software development and data infrastructure experience, including at least 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, alongside expert-level SQL and PL/pgSQL.
Nice To Haves
- Track record of 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.
- Success 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.
- Strong understanding of data security, encryption, role-based access control, and compliance requirements in regulated environments such as FedRAMP, NIST, or GDPR.
- Fluency with AI-assisted engineering tools and workflows to accelerate tooling development, query analysis, and migration validation.
- Track record of turning 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, transaction ID wraparound prevention, lock management, WAL and checkpoint behavior, buffer management, query planner internals, and table and index bloat remediation.
- Design, build, and maintain automated database schema-change pipelines, DDL validation, lock and timeout guardrails, and pre-flight migration checks to support safe, zero-downtime deployments.
- Architect and execute large-scale data migrations, major PostgreSQL version upgrades, and platform transitions across PostgreSQL, GCP CloudSQL, AlloyDB, and AWS RDS.
- 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.
- Design and maintain Change Data Capture, logical replication, and outbox or streaming integrations connecting transactional PostgreSQL databases to 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 organization.
Benefits
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Health savings account
- Flexible spending accounts for medical, limited-purpose, and dependent care expenses
- 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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
