Principal Database Engineer

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end data architecture for a fast-growing SaaS platform that serves thousands of universities and millions of students worldwide. You will define how data is stored, accessed, and scaled across relational, search, and analytics engines, ensuring every query returns in milliseconds even as usage 10×.
• • Architect resilient, cloud-native database topologies on AWS and GCP that can survive regional outages without data loss or downtime. You will design active-active replication, automated failover, and blue-green deployments so new releases never interrupt the student experience.
• • Model clean, extensible schemas for new product lines—mentorship marketplaces, career communities, employer dashboards—balancing normalization with query speed. You will introduce partitioning, sharding, and time-series strategies that keep storage costs flat while data volume doubles every year.
• • Profile and optimize every slow query across PostgreSQL, MySQL, Aurora, and Snowflake. You will dive into execution plans, rewrite ORM-generated SQL, add covering indexes, and tune memory parameters to cut P95 latency by 50 % within your first quarter.
• • Build a culture of performance: create reusable runbooks, automated linting rules, and weekly "query-clinic" sessions for engineering squads. You will coach backend developers on anti-patterns, connection pooling, and batching so the next feature ships fast and stays fast.
• • Establish gold-standard observability: deploy Prometheus, Grafana, and CloudWatch dashboards that surface replication lag, bloat ratios, cache hit rates, and lock contention in real time. You will set SLOs and error budgets that align database health with customer NPS.
• • Secure the crown jewels. You will design row-level ACLs, field-level encryption, and tokenized PII flows that satisfy SOC 2, GDPR, and FERPA. Quarterly red-team exercises will prove your controls withstand attack scenarios.
• • Plan bullet-proof disaster recovery: nightly encrypted snapshots, cross-region restores validated every 48 hours, and documented RPO/RTO under 15 minutes. You will run game-day drills that train the entire engineering org to recover from region loss in under an hour.
• • Evaluate and pilot next-gen engines—Firestore for real-time chat, DynamoDB for high-velocity events, Elasticsearch for fuzzy career-path search—writing RFCs that weigh cost, latency, and operational overhead before any migration.
• • Partner with Data Science to extend our Snowflake warehouse with curated marts that power ML models predicting student engagement and employer ROI. You will own ETL pipelines that move 100 GB nightly without impacting production OLTP workloads.