Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer
tastyliveChicago, Illinois, United States · Posted TodayDescription
Company: tastytrade
Role: Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer
Location: Chicago, IL — Hybrid
About the Role
As a Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer, you'll own the health, performance, and durability of high-throughput Postgres clusters running both on bare metal / on-prem VMs and on Amazon RDS. This is a hands-on role: you will read query plans, tune indexes, run failover drills, review application code, and write high-quality documentation.
This is not a ticket-queue DBA position. You will work inside the development process — reviewing migrations before they ship, pairing with application teams on data access patterns, assisting with performance troubleshooting, and contributing to incident resolution and process improvement.
What You'll Do:
- Own performance for high-volume OLTP Postgres workloads: query plan analysis, index strategy, statistics and autovacuum tuning, connection pooling, partitioning, and schema design review.
- Design, deploy, and operate highly available clusters using Patroni, including replication topology, failover and switchover procedures, and regular testing.
- Own the backup and recovery program end to end — backup tooling, retention, PITR, and, most importantly, routine restore verification with documented RTO/RPO.
- Manage Postgres in both on-prem and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL environments, including the operational differences between them (parameter groups, extension availability, failover behavior, upgrade paths).
- Plan and execute major-version upgrades and large migrations with minimal downtime.
- Review application code and database migrations written in Ruby (Rails/ActiveRecord) and Java (JDBC), catching N+1 queries, unsafe DDL, missing indexes, and lock-taking migrations before they reach production.
- Build and maintain observability for the database tier: metrics, slow query capture, lock and wait-event analysis, and capacity forecasting.
- Automate routine operations. Manual runbooks are a starting point, not a destination.
- Participate in an on-call rotation: lead incident response, write postmortems, and file follow-up tickets to prevent recurrence.
- Write and maintain internal documentation: runbooks, architecture decision records, upgrade playbooks, and developer-facing guidance on using Postgres well.
- Assist in sizing and future scaling of on-prem server hardware.
- Participate in disaster recovery planning and exercises.
Who You Are:
- You have deep PostgreSQL expertise with the query planner — you can read EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) output and explain why the planner chose a plan, not just that it was slow.
- You have hands-on indexing strategy experience across B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN, partial, expression, and covering indexes, including the write-amplification cost of each.
- You understand replication — physical and logical replication, replication slots, lag diagnosis, and the failure modes of each.
- You must have production experience with Patroni-managed clusters, including having handled a real failover.
- You must have proven ownership of a backup and restore program (pgBackRest, Barman) — including having performed a production restore under pressure.
- You have experience operating Postgres at meaningful scale in both self-managed (on-prem/VM/bare metal) and managed RDS environments.
- You must have strong Linux fundamentals: filesystem and I/O behavior, memory and hugepages, systemd, networking, and performance tooling.
- You have a software development background: creating, reviewing, and merging pull requests as part of a mandatory peer review process, and writing runbooks and design documentation.
- You have working proficiency in Ruby and Java, with enough Python literacy to read, review, and modify it confidently.
- You must be an excellent written communicator. Clear incident summaries, review comments, and design proposals are a core part of this job, not an afterthought.
- You have excellent documentation practice — a demonstrated habit of leaving systems better documented than you found them.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with connection poolers (PgBouncer) at scale.
- Infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (Terraform, Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, etc.).
- Kubernetes-hosted Postgres operators.
- Active-active multi-site architecture.
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