Staff Database Engineer

Role Description

The Staff Database Engineer is a senior technical leader reporting to the Director, Business Intelligence. They will be responsible for architecting, optimizing, and scaling the organization’s mission critical database systems. This role drives complex technical initiatives, leads cross team architectural efforts, and ensures the long term reliability, performance, and integrity of data platforms. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with strong systems thinking, broad cross-functional influence, and the ability to deliver durable, high impact solutions in a fast-moving environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Database Architecture & Design:
  • Design and evolve scalable, highly available database architectures for transactional and analytical systems.
  • Define long-term data storage, access, and modeling strategies aligned with business growth.
  • Lead evaluations of new database technologies, patterns, and cloud capabilities.
• Performance Engineering & Optimization:
  • Diagnose complex database performance issues and design solutions involving schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, caching, and architectural refactoring.
  • Conduct end-to-end tuning of high-volume workloads across services and data flows.
  • Establish performance baselines, monitoring standards, and proactive optimization strategies.
• Reliability, Scalability & Operations:
  • Own the reliability and scalability posture of database systems across multiple products and services.
  • Define and implement robust backup, restoration, high availability, and disaster recovery strategies.
  • Partner with SRE and platform teams to improve observability, automation, and operational efficiency.
• Data Governance, Security & Quality:
  • Ensure compliance with data governance practices, security standards, and audit requirements.
  • Implement and maintain access control strategies, encryption policies, and data integrity safeguards.
  • Establish data modeling standards and best practices for teams across the organization.
• Cross Team Leadership & Influence:
  • Lead architectural discussions, design reviews, and technical decision-making across engineering teams.
  • Guide teams through modernization efforts such as migrations, schema redesigns, and system decompositions.
  • Mentor engineers of all levels and elevate database excellence across the organization.
• Automation & Tooling:
  • Develop automation for deployment, maintenance, provisioning, and operational workflows.
  • Build internal tools that improve developer experience, reduce manual DBA workload, and standardize processes.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in database engineering, data architecture, or related technical roles.
• Deep expertise with relational database systems (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, Aurora, SQL Server).
• Strong proficiency in SQL, performance tuning, indexing strategies, and query optimization.
• Proven experience designing and scaling high throughput, mission critical production systems.
• Extensive experience with backup/recovery strategies, HA/replication patterns, and disaster recovery.
• Ability to diagnose complex system interactions across applications, networks, and databases.
• Strong scripting/automation experience (Python, Bash, PowerShell, etc.).
• Excellent communication and cross team collaboration skills.

Preferred

• Experience with distributed databases or cloud native data platforms (AWS RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, BigQuery, Snowflake, etc.).
• Familiarity with microservices architectures, event driven systems, or streaming technologies.
• Background in data modeling, data governance, or enterprise architecture.
• Prior leadership in modernization initiatives or large-scale migrations.

What Success Looks Like

• You are viewed as a domain expert and trusted technical advisor across engineering.
• You proactively identify risks, scaling limits, architectural gaps, and long-term opportunities.
• Your work results in measurable improvements to performance, reliability, and developer efficiency.
• You raise the technical bar for database engineering across the organization.

Business Travel

• 0%

Location

• Remote; must reside in the United States

Pay Range

• $175-195k
• This position may also be eligible for short-term and long-term incentives based on individual and company performance.
• Base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Company Description

This job description is not intended to be all-inclusive. Employee may perform other related duties as assigned to meet the ongoing needs of the organization.

Here at ecoATM/Gazelle we value diversity & belonging and are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic, and are fairly and equitably compensated based on current market data. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know.