Senior Database Engineer

About the Role

Spreedly is hiring a Senior Database Engineer to become the go-to database expert on our Reliability team. You'll improve the performance and reliability of our existing distributed database environment and help engineering teams make database changes safely.

This is a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports, and "senior" here means more than years of experience: you'll be the person the rest of engineering looks to on anything at the database layer. The opportunity is to shape how we manage and improve our databases, not to lead a migration. We already run CockroachDB, with infrastructure operated through Cockroach Labs' managed service. That means your focus is the part that's ours to own: workload, schema, queries, settings, capacity, and the practices around change.

Our Reliability team works across application engineering, infrastructure, and platform to improve monitoring, prevent incidents, and recover quickly when incidents happen. It isn't a textbook SRE team. It's a small, highly autonomous group focused on continuous improvement, with real room to see a problem, propose a fix, and carry it through within the team's priorities. Database availability and performance matter a great deal in a payments environment, and the improvements you make here show up directly in the reliability our customers depend on.

Responsibilities:

Improve database performance

• Investigate our current database setup to find performance bottlenecks and reliability risks, using instrumentation, code review, and staging tests where appropriate.
• Find and improve slow-running queries, identify missing or inefficient indexes, and evaluate database settings against what the application actually needs.
• Diagnose distributed-database issues such as transaction contention and retries, hot ranges, and inefficient access patterns, and partner with application engineers to fix them at the source.
• Establish performance baselines so meaningful changes in workload behavior are visible early.

Be the database subject-matter expert

• Help engineering teams understand the risks and trade-offs of significant changes before they reach production, including schema migrations, new access patterns, and configuration changes.
• Participate in design reviews for systems that place significant demands on the database, and give clear guidance on schema design, primary key selection, indexing, and transaction boundaries.
• Contribute database expertise to incident response and root-cause analysis, and turn what we learn into lasting fixes.

Own database practices

• Develop safer migration procedures, documentation, and guidance so application teams can evolve data models without needing you involved in every step.
• Take ongoing ownership of operational practices, including planning version upgrades, validating backup and recovery against our availability objectives, and keeping cluster settings and sizing right for our workload.
• Improve database observability so the signals that matter (latency, retries, contention, range health, capacity) are visible and actionable alongside our broader production monitoring.
• Work with Cockroach Labs as a knowledgeable counterpart on our managed environment, and help us right-size our database footprint as we grow.

Partner across engineering

• Work closely with infrastructure, platform, and application engineers to improve database performance and availability.
• Mentor engineers on database troubleshooting, performance, and distributed-database concepts.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience in a role where operating and optimizing production databases was your primary job, not a side responsibility of application development.
• Deep, hands-on experience managing distributed databases, including their performance and high-availability behavior.
• Hands-on experience managing relational databases supporting business-critical production systems.
• A track record of diagnosing database inefficiencies and delivering measurable improvements to queries, indexing, schema, or configuration.
• Strong SQL skills and fluency with execution plans, transaction management, and the trade-offs of distributed SQL (replication, consistency, consensus, distributed transactions).
• The ability to assess the risk of a database change and explain technical trade-offs clearly to other engineers.
• An independent approach to investigating unfamiliar systems, identifying priorities, and carrying improvements through to completion.
• A considerate, collaborative working style with teams whose work depends on yours, and whose expertise you depend on.

Additional Skills We Value:

• Production experience administering CockroachDB at meaningful transaction volumes, including diagnosing contention, transaction retries, and hot ranges.
• PostgreSQL administration experience.
• Experience operating a managed database service and working effectively with the vendor's support and engineering teams.
• Experience with zero- or minimal-downtime schema migrations on large, high-traffic tables.
• Experience supporting payments, financial technology, or similarly availability-sensitive platforms.
• Experience with database capacity planning and cluster sizing, including multi-region topologies.
• Experience building operational tooling or checks in Python, Go, or similar languages.
• Familiarity with how ORMs (for example, Rails ActiveRecord) shape database access patterns.
• Cloud experience on AWS or Azure; database-focused cloud certifications are a plus.
• Neither CockroachDB nor PostgreSQL experience is a prerequisite if you bring the depth of distributed database management experience this role needs.

We Offer Our US-Based Employees:

• Competitive salary + Equity
• Outstanding Medical and Dental benefits, including 100% employer-paid option
• Company-paid Life and Disability insurance
• Optional vision and supplemental insurance options, and various Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
• Open Paid Time Off policy + 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents
• Matching 401(k) plan (5% up to $5,000 yearly)
• $1,000 annual professional development stipend
• Monthly home working/digital lifestyle stipend, new MacBook, and one-time accessory reimbursement
• Access to company-paid professional coaching service
• Visits to HQ in Durham, North Carolina for remote employees