Database Engineer

We are looking for a hands-on Senior PostgreSQL DBA / Database Reliability Engineer to improve the performance, resilience and operational safety of a production platform running on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.

This role goes beyond traditional database administration. The primary objective is to ensure that the database platform:

• operates within a clearly defined and measurable safe operating envelope;
• is protected against excessive connections, concurrency spikes and abnormal workloads;
• provides sufficient observability to detect degradation before database saturation;
• isolates expensive or abnormal workloads before they create platform-wide incidents;
• fails over and recovers predictably without creating secondary overload during recovery.

You will work closely with Platform Engineering, application development and operational teams to review the current architecture, identify risks and implement sustainable database reliability controls.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on experience working with PostgreSQL in high-load production environments.
• Strong practical experience with AWS Aurora PostgreSQL, including writer/reader architecture, replication, failover, and capacity management.
• Deep understanding of PostgreSQL performance tuning: execution plans, indexing, query optimization, wait events, locks, transactions and statistics.
• Experience with EXPLAIN ANALYZE, pg_stat_statements, PostgreSQL system views and AWS database-performance monitoring tools.
• Solid knowledge of autovacuum, table and index bloat, transaction-ID management, data retention, archival and high-volume cleanup strategies.
• Experience configuring and tuning database connection layers such as AWS RDS Proxy, PgBouncer or similar solutions.
• Understanding of connection pooling, concurrency limits, backpressure, workload throttling and protection against connection or retry storms.
• Experience defining database capacity thresholds and identifying safe operating limits based on real workload metrics and load testing.
• Strong knowledge of database observability using CloudWatch, Database Insights/Performance Insights, Grafana, Datadog or similar platforms.
• Practical experience with database backup, recovery, failover testing and application retry behaviour.
• Understanding of read scaling, replica-lag considerations and read-after-write consistency requirements.
• Experience creating database monitoring, alerting and operational runbooks.
• Ability to work with Platform Engineering and development teams to investigate performance and reliability issues across application and database layers.
• Upper-Intermediate or higher English level for technical discussions and documentation.

Nice to Have

• Experience with very large transactional tables and PostgreSQL partitioning.
• Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes-based applications and asynchronous workloads.
• Experience conducting database load, stress and resilience testing.
• AWS or PostgreSQL-related certifications.

What we offer:
 

• Paid vacation — 16 days per year;
• Documented (16 days) and undocumented (5 days) sick leave;
• Leave for significant life events;
• Compensation for medical insurance (for our employees based in UA);
• Flexible working hours (start at 8.00-11.00 o’clock);
• Weekends according to the Ukrainian/Local calendar;
• Engaging projects with opportunities for career growth;
• Certifications, Udemy courses;
• Corporate events, team-building activities,
• Gifts and recognition from the company;
• A friendly, open, and supportive team culture without excessive bureaucracy.