Senior Postgres Engineer Overview
We are seeking a Senior Postgres Engineer to own and tune our self-managed, on-premises Postgres deployment. You will help us get more from Postgres by tuning what we run and adopting existing extensions instead of building our own.
Location: Remote. You will work remotely on infrastructure hosted on-premises.
Responsibilities
- Performance: Assess and tune the deployment across configuration, query and index performance, and operational practices
- Cover on-prem concerns such as hardware, storage, OS-level tuning, replication, backup and recovery, and upgrades
- Identify bottlenecks and recommend prioritized, practical fixes
- Extension selection: Recommend existing Postgres extensions or plugins we can adopt instead of building custom solutions
- Advise on maturity, maintenance risk, and fit for each recommendation
- Reliability and operations: Design, run, and improve high availability, replication (streaming and logical), and failover
- Own backup, point-in-time recovery, and regular disaster-recovery testing
- Plan and execute major-version upgrades and patching with minimal downtime
- Automate provisioning, configuration, and routine maintenance
- Maintain runbooks, documentation, and database security and access controls
- Technical leadership: Answer questions and review designs as they come up; Mentor and guide the engineers who own the system day to day
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of hands-on experience operating and tuning Postgres in production at scale
- Experience running self-managed Postgres on-prem, not only managed cloud services
- Working knowledge of the Postgres extension ecosystem, such as pg_stat_statements, pg_partman, and pg_repack
- Deep knowledge of Postgres internals, including MVCC, WAL, autovacuum, the query planner, locking, and replication slots
- Proven query and index tuning with EXPLAIN ANALYZE, pg_stat_statements, partitioning, and bloat management
- Production experience with high availability, replication (streaming and logical), and automated failover
- Experience with connection pooling and load balancing
- Experience with backup and recovery, including point-in-time recovery and disaster-recovery testing
- Scripting and automation skills for provisioning, configuration, and routine operations
- Experience with monitoring and alerting
- Strong written and verbal communication, and a record of leading root-cause analysis
Preferred Qualifications
- Postgres committer or contributor status
- Experience building Postgres extensions in C or Rust
- Experience operating multi-terabyte Postgres deployments
Salary Range
$114,000.00 - $180,000.00 USD (Salary)
Please note that the salary information provided herein is base pay only (gross); it does not include other forms of compensation which may or may not apply to this specific position, namely, performance-based bonuses, benefits-related payments, or other general incentives - none of which are guaranteed, may be subject to specific eligibility requirements, and are wholly within the discretion of Ast