Staff Data Platform Engineer

Job summary

The Staff Data Platform Engineer owns the reliability, performance, scaling, and cloud deployment of databases supporting fraud workflows and real-time API decisions. The role operates Postgres and Redis on AWS, automates database infrastructure with Terraform, and improves reliability, observability, security, deployment safety, and cost efficiency. It also partners with product engineers on scalable data models and leads data infrastructure projects from planning through rollout.

Benefits

Qualifications

• At least 6 years of experience in database reliability engineering, data platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps, including substantial production database operations.
• Deep Postgres expertise in query planning, indexing, replication, upgrades, and production performance troubleshooting.
• Experience scaling datastores in a high-growth environment, including migrations, sharding, and capacity planning.
• Experience operating managed databases on AWS or another major cloud using infrastructure as code.
• Strong Python skills and experience working in application codebases; Django experience is a plus.
• Experience building CI/CD and release automation for continuous delivery and safe schema migrations.
• Track record of reducing cloud costs while maintaining reliability.
• Experience with distributed or horizontally scalable databases such as Aurora, Citus, CockroachDB, or YugabyteDB.
• Experience with CDC or logical replication, including verification and rollback.
• Experience building internal database tooling or database-as-a-service platforms.

Responsibilities

• Design, operate, and scale Postgres and Redis datastores on AWS, including provisioning, replication, high availability, and disaster recovery.
• Optimize queries, indexes, schemas, connection pooling, caching, vacuuming, bloat, and partitioning.
• Plan database growth using read replicas, partitioning, archival, sharding, and horizontal scaling.
• Define data-layer SLOs, recovery targets, backup testing, failover drills, and incident runbooks.
• Improve deployment pipelines, test environments, release automation, and zero-downtime schema migrations.
• Manage database deployments as code with Terraform.
• Optimize database infrastructure costs through instance sizing, storage and IOPS tuning, and reserved capacity.
• Build data-layer observability in Datadog and Grafana, including actionable alerts.
• Partner with product engineers on scalable data models and access patterns.
• Implement datastore encryption, access management, auditing, and network isolation.
• Lead data infrastructure projects from roadmap through rollout.
• Mentor teammates and promote engineering quality, documentation, and operational rigor.

Skills

Languages

Industry

Relocation