Staff Database Engineer
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Key skills for this role
About the Role
TensorWave is looking for a Staff Database Engineer to design and own database architecture, ensure reliability, and lead performance engineering for critical infrastructure. The role requires deep expertise in PostgreSQL, MySQL, and database automation, with experience in HPC/AI environments preferred.
Key Skills for This Role
Responsibilities
- Design and own database architecture for critical infrastructure and platform services
- Define standard database patterns for high availability, replication, failover, backup and restore, and performance baselining
- Establish database design standards for new internal platforms
- Operate and improve production database environments across PostgreSQL, MySQL, Percona, and adjacent systems
- Own the lifecycle of database systems including provisioning, configuration, version upgrades, and performance tuning
- Troubleshoot and resolve production database issues
- Drive root cause analysis for database related incidents
- Serve as the senior database engineering owner for infrastructure adjacent database platforms including Slurm and NetBox
- Build deep database observability beyond basic dashboards
- Create database automation patterns integrated with existing infrastructure tooling
- Act as the technical lead for major database incidents
- Mentor L4 and L5 engineers on database operations and performance analysis
Requirements
- 8+ years of production database engineering, database administration, or database architecture experience
- Strong hands on experience with PostgreSQL in production environments
- Strong hands on experience with MySQL, Percona, or equivalent relational database platforms
- Experience designing and operating highly available database systems
- Experience with replication, failover, backup, restore, and disaster recovery validation
- Deep SQL performance tuning experience
- Strong Linux systems knowledge
- Experience supporting production incidents and performing root cause analysis
- Experience building or improving database monitoring and observability
- Ability to work across infrastructure, DevOps, platform, and application engineering teams
- Ability to define standards, influence architecture, and mentor other engineers
Full Job Posting
About TensorWave
- Our mission is simple: deliver seamless, secure, reliable, and resilient AI compute at scale.
- We've built a versatile cloud platform that eliminates infrastructure barriers, empowering builders to focus on innovation instead of fighting their stack.
About The Role
- We’re looking for a Staff Database Engineer to join our team during an exciting phase of growth.
- You’ll be responsible for database architecture, database reliability, infrastructure adjacent database platforms, performance engineering, observability, automation, operational maturity, incident response, and engineering leadership.
What You’ll Do Database Architecture & Platform Ownership
- Design and own database architecture for critical infrastructure and platform services, including PostgreSQL backed internal platforms, Slurm accounting and operational databases, NetBox and infrastructure source of truth databases, custom internal applications and automation services, observability
- Define standard database patterns for high availability, replication, failover, backup and restore, point in time recovery, performance baselining, capacity planning, upgrade lifecycle management, access control and operational security.
- Establish database design standards for new internal platforms, including schema review, indexing strategy, query design, service ownership boundaries, and production readiness requirements.
PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Database Reliability
- Operate and improve production database environments across PostgreSQL, MySQL, Percona, and adjacent systems.
- Own the lifecycle of database systems, including provisioning, configuration, version upgrades, replication topology design, performance tuning, backup validation, disaster recovery testing, decommissioning, documentation and runbook creation.
- Troubleshoot and resolve production database issues involving query latency, lock contention, replication lag, storage I/O bottlenecks, connection exhaustion, poor indexing, schema design problems, database capacity constraints, backup or restore failures.
- Drive root cause analysis for database related incidents and convert findings into durable engineering improvements.
Slurm, NetBox, and Infrastructure Data Systems
- Serve as the senior database engineering owner for infrastructure adjacent database platforms, including Slurm and NetBox.
- For Slurm environments, support and improve database architecture related to SlurmDBD, accounting data, job history, reporting queries, performance and retention strategy, database scaling, backup and recovery, long term operational reliability.
- For NetBox and source of truth systems, support PostgreSQL performance, database lifecycle planning, backup and restore validation, data integrity, schema impact review, integration patterns with automation systems.
- Partner with DevOps, Infrastructure, MLOps, and Platform Engineering teams to ensure database backed systems are designed to scale.
Performance Engineering & Observability
- Build deep database observability beyond basic dashboards.
- Develop and maintain visibility into query performance, execution plans, index usage, replication health, locking behavior, buffer/cache efficiency, storage latency, connection pool behavior, OS level database bottlenecks.
- Use tools such as PostgreSQL native statistics, MySQL/Percona tooling, Prometheus, Grafana, PMM, Query logs, slow query logs, eBPF/BCC or equivalent low level profiling tools, Linux performance tooling.
- Create performance baselines and alerting standards for critical database platforms.
- Identify recurring database failure patterns and build preventive monitoring, automation, and operational guardrails.
Automation, Standards, and Operational Maturity
- Create database automation patterns that can be integrated with existing infrastructure tooling.
- Partner with DevOps and Infrastructure Engineering to automate database provisioning, configuration standards, backup verification, health checks, replication checks, user and permission management, upgrade workflows, monitoring deployment, runbook driven recovery procedures.
- Contribute database specific modules, roles, or workflows to Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, or internal automation platforms where appropriate.
- Define production database readiness standards for new services before they are promoted into critical environments.
Incident Response & Engineering Leadership
- Act as the technical lead for major database incidents.
- Own or support triage, root cause analysis, cross team coordination, customer or stakeholder impact analysis, postmortems, corrective action plans, long term remediation.
- Mentor L4 and L5 engineers on database operations, SQL troubleshooting, HA design, incident response, and performance analysis.
- Provide senior technical review for database impacting changes across infrastructure and platform teams.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of production database engineering, database administration, or database architecture experience
- Strong hands on experience with PostgreSQL in production environments
- Strong hands on experience with MySQL, Percona, or equivalent relational database platforms
- Experience designing and operating highly available database systems
- Experience with replication, failover, backup, restore, and disaster recovery validation
- Deep SQL performance tuning experience, including execution plan analysis, index design, query rewrite, schema optimization, lock contention troubleshooting, storage and I/O analysis
- Strong Linux systems knowledge
- Experience supporting production incidents and performing root cause analysis
- Experience building or improving database monitoring and observability
- Ability to work across infrastructure, DevOps, platform, and application engineering teams
- Ability to define standards, influence architecture, and mentor other engineers without requiring direct management authority
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with SlurmDBD, Slurm accounting databases, or HPC/AI infrastructure database workloads
- Experience with NetBox or other infrastructure source of truth platforms
- Experience with Percona XtraDB Cluster, ProxySQL, or advanced MySQL/Percona architectures
- Experience with PostgreSQL HA tooling and replication architectures
- Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, PMM, Splunk, or similar observability platforms
- Experience with eBPF/BCC, perf, strace, or other low level Linux diagnostic tooling
- Experience supporting databases for SaaS, cloud, HPC, AI infrastructure, or large multi tenant platforms
- Experience with MongoDB, Oracle, SQL Server, or other secondary database platforms
- Experience with database automation using Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD systems, or internal tooling
- Experience with zero downtime migrations, major version upgrades, and production database consolidation
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