Senior Database Engineer

About PENN Entertainment: PENN Entertainment, Inc. is North America’s leading provider of integrated entertainment, sports media content, and omni-channel casino gaming experiences. Powering cutting-edge digital products like Hollywood Casino, theScore Bet Sportsbook, and theScore sports media app, PENN orchestrates state-of-the-art platforms using proprietary in-house technology. With a distributed engineering presence spanning across North America, PENN Interactive balances a high-performance culture with a deep commitment to career expansion, pushing the structural limits of digital streaming, interactive transactions, and real-time cloud gaming deployments.

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly autonomous, systems-fluent, and orchestration-focused Senior Database Engineer to join our thrived Engineering cell under a permanent, full-time remote layout open across the United States. In this business-critical data reliability seat, you will sit on the front lines of architecture, database design, and high-availability operations within our advanced Cloud Native (Kubernetes) environments. Shifting completely away from routine non-regulated office filing systems, standalone visual text marketing copy layouts, or basic user dashboard theme formatting, you will direct an active relational storage partitioning, distributed event streaming, and automated disaster recovery infrastructure laboratory. This position requires a database software authority with 5+ years of history who guides platform availability fluidly natively using PostgreSQL and DevOps primitives, manages complex cloud containers via specialized Kubernetes operators, builds robust infrastructure-as-code deployment engines via GitOps pipelines, and mitigates active production performance hazards under strict compliance audit constraints.

Key Responsibilities

• Cloud Native DB Governance: Evaluate, architect, and optimize large-scale distributed relational systems to maintain peak transactional throughput and availability natively utilizing PostgreSQL structures.
• Kubernetes Container Orchestration: Deploy and manage high-load relational clusters inside production Kubernetes nodes using specialized operators, specifically Zalando and CloudNativePG (CNPG) .
• Event Streaming & Data Pipeline Tuning: Configure and optimize real-time distributed data pipelines, Change Data Capture (CDC) filters, and streaming nodes leveraging Kafka integrations.
• Query Optimization & Schema Triage: Investigate and refine data tables, partitioning models, views, and complex relational queries to maximize cluster performance profiles and reduce latency metrics.
• Infrastructure as Code Automation: Author, modularize, and deploy declarative multi-region cloud infrastructures, compute services, and storage systems via Terraform blueprints and GitOps methodologies.
• Business Continuity & Replication Management: Oversee, test, and automate real-time database replication, fault-tolerant snapshotting frameworks, and failover runbooks to secure strict business continuity targets.
• Production Support and Incident Response: Act as a primary technical anchor to resolve operational database outages, leading rapid diagnostic triages and system remediations within agile Scrum/Kanban structures.
• Compliance & Security Auditing: Ensure database security boundaries, least-privilege configurations, and auditing rules align safely with stringent state and federal regulatory frameworks.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• A minimum of 5+ years of proven professional history operating inside a Database Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Database Administrator (DBA), or closely matching data platform software role with a focus on PostgreSQL structures.
• Expert Cloud Environment Command: Extensive, hands-on production history engineering data systems within either Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) cloud infrastructures.
• Demonstrated technical mastery operating directly with specialized Kubernetes (K8s) operators —specifically Zalando or CNPG setups.
• Practical production familiarity with distributed event streaming ecosystems (such as Kafka ), Change Data Capture (CDC) configurations, and complex ETL pipelines.
• High-Level Programming Fluency: A minimum of 3+ years of professional experience writing robust, maintainable system code leveraging Python or Go (Golang) .
• Proven background building declarative multi-account architectures using infrastructure as code (IaC) via Terraform .
• Location Context: Position operates under remote parameters open exclusively to qualified database platform engineers residing permanently within the United States .

Preferred Strategic Indicators (Nice to Have)

• Prior experience or technical background engineering database performance layers inside high-volume transactional fields like online sports betting, digital gaming, fin-tech, or streaming media tech .
• Familiarity with scaling telemetry monitoring platforms and alarms to proactively predict query performance drops.
• Historical exposure navigating applications subject to formal external compliance, cybersecurity audits, or state licensing constraints.

What We Offer

• Top-Tier US Digital Gaming Salary Grid: A highly competitive annual base salary structure of $150,000 - $190,000 USD , supplemented by annual corporate performance bonus plans and eligibility for best-in-class total rewards.
• 100% remote workspace infrastructure freedom from your home office setup based anywhere across the United States.
• Direct High-Scale Infrastructure Ownership: Elite professional credentials gained by architecting the primary data stores powering major sports apps and interactive platforms used by millions.
• Comprehensive health preservation benefits, providing premium personalized coverage routes across physical, financial, and emotional wellness needs.
• Access to robust continuous learning avenues, including dedicated education and industry conference reimbursements inside a fun, relaxed, and high-craftsmanship team ecosystem.