Lead Database Engineer – DevSecOps

What You'll Do: We're looking for a highly motivated Lead Database Engineer to take ownership of Nue's database infrastructure, scalability, performance, and reliability. You'll be the dedicated expert responsible for ensuring our databases are fast, resilient, fault tolerant, and ready to scale 10x. This is not a traditional DBA role. We run managed databases on AWS and are actively migrating toward a highly scalable and fault tolerant architecture. You'll work at the intersection of infrastructure engineering and data platform design — automating operations, driving performance, and partnering with product engineering teams to ensure our data layer supports rapid growth. If you're passionate about cloud-native database engineering, performance at scale, and building systems that just work — this is the role for you. Level: Senior (L6–L7) Reports to: Senior Director of Engineering, Platform & Infrastructure Responsibilities: Own and operate Nue's database fleet across AWS RDS (PostgreSQL), keeping things reliable, available, and cost-efficient. Lead the migration from self-managed RDS to fully managed PostgreSQL (Aurora) — strategy, testing, and rollout. Drive database performance — fix slow queries, optimize indexes, tune connection pooling, and maintain transactional integrity. Design and implement monitoring and alerting across the infrastructure and application layers. Architect replication strategies — read/write separation, streaming replication, and failover for high availability. Plan for scale — load testing and capacity planning to support continued customer growth. Build and maintain backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures, tested regularly. Ensure zero-downtime migrations with backward-compatible schema changes. Partner with product engineering teams on schema design, query optimization, and database best practices. Use AI-powered tooling throughout your work — from query optimization to runbook automation. Own database security — encryption, access controls, secrets rotation, and audit logging in line with SOC 2 Type II. Participate in on-call rotations and lead resolution of database-related incidents. What Success Looks Like: Migration to fully-managed and highly-scalable PostgreSQL database infrastructure is complete; migration is planned, tested, and rolled out with zero data loss and minimal downtime, replacing self-managed RDS instances, positioning the data layer to support 10x customer growth. Read/write architecture is optimized — Streaming replication, read replicas, and failover strategies are in place, reducing primary database load and ensuring high availability targets are consistently met. Database performance is proactively managed, not reactive — Monitoring, alerting, and observability (slow queries, replication lag, connection saturation, resource utilization) are fully instrumented, with issues caught and resolved before they impact customers. AI is embedded across database operations — AI-powered tooling is actively used for migration planning, query optimization, monitoring, runbook automation, and day-to-day operational workflows — not as an afterthought, but as a force multiplier. Disaster recovery is tested and trusted — Backup, restore, and DR procedures meet defined RPO/RTO targets and are validated through regular drills. Engineering teams treat you as a partner — Product engineering squads (Billing, Lifecycle, Data & Integrations, DevEx) proactively engage you on schema design, query optimization, and database best practices. What You'll Bring: 7+ years in backend or infrastructure engineering, with 3+ years focused on database engineering in production SaaS. Deep PostgreSQL expertise — query optimization, EXPLAIN analysis, indexing, partitioning, vacuuming, and replication. Hands-on experience with AWS managed databases — RDS and Aurora. Experience with database monitoring tools such as CloudWatch, pganalyze, or Datadog. Solid grasp of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / OpenTofu) for database infrastructure. Experience with connection pooling (PgBouncer, RDS Proxy) and schema migration tools (Flyway, Liquibase). Strong scripting skills in Bash and Python. Active user of AI development tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude) in day-to-day workflows. Strong communicator who can explain trade-offs and collaborate across teams. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience. Bonus Points (optional): Experience with other data stores such as MySQL, Redis, DynamoDB, etc. Familiarity with event streaming platforms (Kafka) and how they interact with database systems. Domain knowledge in billing, revenue operations, or financial systems. Apply To This Job