Our client is a mid-market B2B SaaS company with 800 paying customers and a multi-tenant Postgres environment. They're hiring a remote Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator.
Responsibilities
Own production PostgreSQL health across 12 Aurora clusters: capacity planning, query performance, replication health, and backup verification
Lead a quarterly performance review cycle: identify the top 20 worst queries per cluster and partner with product teams on fixes
Maintain index strategy across the platform; remove unused indexes, add missing ones, and periodically REINDEX large tables
Lead Postgres major-version upgrade work, including schema and extension compatibility analysis
Build and maintain self-service tooling for engineers (slow query reports, schema-change linters, query plan visualization)
Set and enforce schema-change standards (online migrations, backfills, lock-aware DDL) across the engineering org
Partner with security on data-classification, encryption at rest, audit logging, and access reviews
Mentor product engineers on Postgres internals, EXPLAIN/ANALYZE, and query optimization
Requirements
7+ years of production PostgreSQL administration in a high-growth SaaS or similar environment
Deep knowledge of Postgres internals: MVCC, vacuum, WAL, autovacuum, planner, and indexing strategies (B-tree, GIN, BRIN, partial)
Hands-on experience with AWS Aurora PostgreSQL or RDS PostgreSQL in production
Strong SQL skills and ability to read EXPLAIN ANALYZE plans and spot subtle performance issues
Experience leading major-version upgrades (12 to 14 to 16, etc.) in production
Comfort with Terraform and at least one scripting language (Python or Bash) for automation
Experience with online schema migration tools (gh-ost, pg-osc, or comparable patterns)
Excellent written communication for design reviews, runbooks, and post-incident reviews
Benefits
Base salary $130,000-$170,000 plus 10% target annual bonus
Equity grant with 4-year vest, 1-year cliff
Medical, dental, and vision (employer pays 100% of employee premium, 60% of dependents)
401(k) with 4% match
$2,500 annual learning and conference budget (PGConf, AWS re:Invent pre-approved)
$1,500 home office stipend plus $100/month internet reimbursement
20 days PTO plus 11 paid holidays plus winter shutdown week