Position Summary

Lightspeed DMS is seeking a Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator to own the fleet of database servers running on AWS (RDS and Aurora PostgreSQL): setting configuration baselines, defining operational standards, driving capacity and cost planning, and ensuring every database in the fleet is healthy, observable, and ready to scale with the business.

This role has two primary areas of accountability. First, you will partner with Software Engineers on database schema, query tuning, and system‑wide best practices that shape how the application interacts with the database. Second, you will partner with Cloud Engineers on cost efficiency, capacity planning, fleet health, observability, and performance. Success looks like a fleet that runs to consistent standards, scales predictably, recovers cleanly, and supports engineers shipping database changes with confidence.

Key Responsibilities

Fleet Operations, Health & Capacity

• Establish standard configuration baselines across RDS and Aurora environments, and drive consistency through automation and Infrastructure as Code.
• Continuously evaluate fleet health — replication, failover readiness, storage growth, and bloat — and remediate systemic issues proactively.
• Define and maintain operational standards for observability, backup validation, maintenance windows, upgrades, and disaster recovery.
• Develop database health scorecards and KPIs covering latency, saturation, replication health, cache efficiency, and resource utilization.
• Forecast compute, storage, and I/O growth trends across the fleet.
• Evaluate scaling strategies — instance sizing, storage type, read replica topology, RDS vs. Aurora — and provide cost/performance recommendations to leadership.
• Manage parameter groups, engine settings, and autovacuum strategy tuned to actual workload.

Query & Schema Performance

• Identify, diagnose, and tune slow or high-cost queries using EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS), pg_stat_statements, auto_explain, and Performance Insights.
• Detect and remediate N+1 and other application-driven query patterns in collaboration with engineers.
• Tune index strategy — create, consolidate, or drop indexes based on workload analysis and bloat.
• Recommend schema changes — normalization, denormalization, partitioning, and table restructuring — driven by measured workload, not theory.
• Guide use of PostgreSQL-native features where they fit: JSONB, full-text search, materialized views, generated columns, and relevant extensions.

Application & Developer Partnership

• Embed with application teams during design and code review to evaluate database access patterns before they ship.
• Review ORM-generated SQL (Hibernate, JPA, etc.) and coach developers on writing efficient, index-friendly queries and avoiding common ORM anti-patterns.
• Provide guidance on connection pool sizing, transaction scope, isolation levels, and PostgreSQL-specific concurrency tools (advisory locks, SKIP LOCKED).
• Author internal playbooks, query review checklists, and reference patterns so good database practices scale across engineering.
• Partner with Software Engineers on every Lightspeed DMS release to apply an N‑1 compatibility strategy. Schema changes use expand / migrate / contract sequences so the database supports both the new and prior release simultaneously, enabling safe rolling deploys and rollback.

Reliability, Change Management & Incident Response

• Establish and enforce a safe migration workflow for schema and data changes: review, staging validation, rollback planning, and zero-downtime patterns (CONCURRENTLY, online column adds, dual-write, expand/contract).
• Guide minor and major version upgrades on RDS and Aurora, including extension compatibility, plan regression testing, and cutover strategy.
• Build and refine Datadog dashboards, monitors, and DBM views covering query latency, lock waits, replication lag, and connection saturation.
• Lead database-related incident response: deep diagnostic analysis (lock chains, long-running transactions, replication issues) and post-incident remediation.
• Define and validate backup, point-in-time recovery, and cross-region replication strategies through periodic DR exercises.

Security & Compliance

• Enforce least-privilege role and grant design across application, replica, and analytics access patterns.
• Support audit, SOC, and compliance requirements through proper logging, retention, and access controls (pgaudit, CloudWatch, parameter group enforcement).
• Partner with the security team to ensure the fleet is secure by default: least privilege, appropriate access restrictions, and encryption at rest and in transit.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of hands-on PostgreSQL administration experience in production environments.
• Strong working experience with AWS RDS and/or Aurora PostgreSQL, including parameter groups, snapshots, read replicas, and failover behavior.
• Deep understanding of MVCC, autovacuum, bloat, locking, isolation levels, and transaction behavior in PostgreSQL.
• Proven experience diagnosing application-driven performance issues in high-scale production environments.
• Strong ability to read EXPLAIN plans and turn analysis into concrete query, index, or schema changes.
• Experience implementing zero-downtime schema migration and backward-compatible deployment strategies in production systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain database tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience tuning Java/JVM applications and reviewing ORM-generated SQL (Hibernate, JPA, MyBatis).
• Familiarity with Datadog Database Monitoring (DBM) or comparable APM-to-database correlation tooling.
• Experience with Terraform or other IaC tools managing RDS/Aurora resources and parameter groups.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes-hosted application stacks (WildFly, Spring, etc.) and how connection pools behave at pod scale.