Headquarters: Remote

JOB SUMMARY

You will own the reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of the PostgreSQL data platform behind our flagship CMS — primarily Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL — along with the infrastructure and automation around it.

This is a reliability engineering role, not a classic administration one. Aurora takes care of patching, backups, failover, and storage growth; you own what it does not — query and index strategy, plan regressions across major version upgrades, vacuum and bloat, connection management, zero-downtime schema change, logical replication, and capacity and cost modeling. Alongside this, you work as a full member of the Infrastructure team on Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and security tooling, and you share the on-call rotation.

You will work in a shared-ownership model: backend teams own their queries and schemas, and you own the platform, guardrails, tooling, and knowledge-sharing that make their decisions safe. You will collaborate closely with backend engineers, DevOps engineers, Security, product owners, and the Data team.

We measure success by the reliability and predictable performance of the data platform, the quality of your incident response, and how well other engineering teams are equipped to make sound database decisions without you in the room.

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS

Database platform (approx. 60%)

• Own the reliability, performance, and scalability of our PostgreSQL platform (primarily Amazon Aurora): query and index strategy, execution plans, configuration tuning, and capacity planning, with particular attention to hot multi-tenant read paths.
• Lead zero-downtime version upgrades and schema migrations at scale, including diagnosing and preventing plan regressions across Aurora major versions.
• Own the operational health of the platform: vacuum strategy and bloat, long-running transactions and wraparound risk, connection management and pooling (including RDS Proxy), lock contention, and logical replication and slot hygiene.
• Review schema changes and DDL from backend teams for lock behavior, migration safety, and performance impact, and build the guardrails and tooling that make safe changes to the default path.
• Own backup, restore, and disaster recovery end-to-end, including rehearsed restore drills and the access, encryption, and auditing controls our compliance obligations require.
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