Senior Database Performance Engineer - Remote

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end lifecycle of database performance at scale: from the moment a slow query alert fires in Datadog to the final deployment of an optimized ActiveRecord statement that shaves milliseconds off every request and saves thousands of dollars in compute.
• • Dive deep into our Rails monolith—line-by-line, association-by-association—to uncover the subtle N+1 queries, missing composite indexes, and eager-loading anti-patterns that silently erode user experience and inflate AWS bills.
• • Build and maintain a living catalog of high-impact query hotspots, ranked by latency, throughput, and cost, then socialize that list across product squads so every feature team ships code that is fast by design.
• • Partner with DBAs to design and test new indexes, partitioning schemes, and schema migrations that can be rolled out to production with zero downtime and zero data loss, even under peak holiday traffic.
• • Instrument every change with Datadog dashboards, synthetic load tests, and canary deployments so you can prove—before and after—that a new composite index cut p95 latency from 120 ms to 18 ms and reduced RDS I/O by 27 %.
• • Champion a culture of performance: run weekly query-clinic office hours, publish internal blog posts on “ActiveRecord tricks that save your weekend,” and embed with feature teams during sprint planning to catch slow queries before they ship.
• • Extend your impact beyond MySQL: prototype TiDB sharding strategies, tune Elasticache eviction policies, and optimize Opensearch aggregation queries so the entire data layer scales linearly as we double our user base every year.
• • Automate the boring parts: write Ruby scripts that auto-generate migration files for missing indexes, create self-service Datadog notebooks for on-call engineers, and integrate query-performance gates into CI so regressions never reach main.
• • Influence product and infrastructure roadmaps by translating latency metrics into dollar costs and user-satisfaction scores, giving executives the data they need to prioritize performance work alongside new features.
• • Serve as the last line of defense during high-traffic events—Black Friday launches, creator viral spikes—by pre-warming caches, pre-scaling replicas, and standing ready with real-time query-kill scripts if the load balancer tips past 80 %.
• • Leave the codebase better than you found it: refactor legacy ActiveRecord scopes into composable, testable query objects; add request-level query tracing so any engineer can see exactly which line of Ruby triggered that 3-second table scan.
• • Contribute to open-source: upstream your Rails performance patches, blog about the edge-case MySQL optimizer bug you solved, and speak at meetups to attract the next generation of performance-obsessed engineers to our mission.