Staff Database Engineer

Role Description

We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Database Engineer to help product teams store and access data effectively at scale. You will be the default place product engineers turn to for "which database should this live in?" and "will this access pattern hold up?" This means leading large projects like migrations and building the platform engineers interact with. You will be driving the largest, load-bearing changes to our data infrastructure. This is a hands-on, software-engineer-first role. It is not a BI, data-warehousing, or analytics-engineering role — that work lives with our BizOps and BI teams.

This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada, or anywhere in Mexico or Colombia.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience working with databases inside the product — owning OLTP access patterns, indexing, query optimization, and schema design as part of building user-facing applications
• Comfortable both writing code in the product stack and reasoning carefully at the database layer
• Deep expertise with a major relational engine (Postgres strongly preferred) in high-volume production; experience migrating workloads (e.g., MongoDB → Postgres) a strong plus
• Expertise in schema design, indexing, query optimization, and zero-downtime migrations on large, live tables
• Experience scaling systems through significant traffic and data growth, in a domain where understanding access patterns at scale is a survival skill — e.g. advertising analytics, fintech / trading systems, large-scale consumer SaaS, or marketplaces
• Strong software engineering ability — writes, reviews, and ships production code, not SQL alone
• Flexible problem solving
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Deep sense of personal ownership and accountability
• Builder mentality

Requirements

• Experience building shared platform primitives — data-sync tooling, ORM best practices, caching (Redis), search, or queues / event streaming
• Experience with payments or financial data
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and observability/performance tooling

Company Description

Owner is the AI-native system local business owners use to succeed, starting with restaurants. We’re building the system that replaces the many tools owners use to run their business. It powers everything from the restaurant’s website, online ordering, CRM, POS, and more.

• Since 2020, we've generated tens of millions in revenue and processed over a billion dollars of online orders.
• 1 in 5 Americans have used an Owner.com website.
• We’ve helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees.
• Our team is now in the low hundreds, with top talent from successful companies in SMB software.
• Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto.