Staff Database Administrator

The Role

We're looking for a Staff Database Administrator (DBA) to define the strategy and technical direction for the reliability, performance, security, and scalability of Apptegy's database infrastructure. As a senior technical leader within our Infrastructure and Platform Engineering team, you'll own database direction across our domain, set the standards other engineers build on, and represent the DBA team on our Architecture Review Board (ARB) as we continue to scale.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in a cloud-first environment, enjoys solving complex, cross-team performance and availability challenges with a high degree of autonomy, and is passionate about building resilient systems that support mission-critical applications. You'll partner closely with Engineering, DevOps, Security, and Product teams—aligning them on the shared responsibility model—to ensure our data platforms remain secure, performant, and highly available, while enabling engineering pods to safely operate their own databases through our internal developer platform.

Beyond our transactional databases, you'll set direction for and optimize our Snowflake data warehouse, which powers analytics and reporting across the company—balancing performance, cost, and data governance as our data volumes grow.

What You'll Do

• Own the strategy and technical direction for Apptegy's production databases hosted in AWS, including PostgreSQL, and other relational database systems.
• Own the database layer of Apptegy's self-service internal developer platform, defining the guardrails that let engineering pods provision, monitor, and operate their own databases safely.
• Define and drive our high-availability, disaster recovery, and corruption-recovery programs, including DR and point-in-time-recovery drill cadence and RTO/RPO targets.
• Set performance strategy across the domain and coach engineers on advanced query tuning, transaction isolation, and execution plan analysis.
• Own schema and migration governance across teams, advising on data models, database migrations, and application data access strategies to ensure long-term performance and reliability.
• Develop and automate operational processes for provisioning, maintenance, monitoring, and recovery.
• Lead cross-team initiatives in data security, governance, compliance, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), defining guardrails such as policy-as-code, retention policies, budget controls, and non-prod data masking.
• Set clear success metrics and hold the team and partner pods accountable to them.
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident improvements for significant database events.
• Represent the DBA team on the Architecture Review Board (ARB), driving well-architected designs across multiple teams and contributing to Apptegy's database engineering standards and best practices.
• Mentor DBAs and senior engineers, develop their technical judgment, and influence hiring decisions.
• Evaluate datastore and buy-versus-build tradeoffs and lead major migration, modernization, and long-term scalability initiatives.
• Administer, set direction for, and optimize our Snowflake data warehouse, including virtual warehouse sizing, resource monitors, role-based access control, and query and cost performance tuning.
• Create and maintain operational documentation, runbooks, and best practices that scale across the organization.

What You'll Bring

• 10+ years of experience administering production database environments, including setting technical direction across teams.
• 5+ years of experience managing databases in AWS.
• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL administration, tuning, and optimization, recognized as a go-to technical authority.
• Experience with Amazon RDS, Aurora, and other AWS database services.
• Hands-on experience administering and setting strategy for a cloud data warehouse, ideally Snowflake.
• Deep understanding of database performance tuning, replication, backup and recovery, and high-availability architectures.
• A proven track record defining and running disaster recovery and business continuity programs.
• Strong knowledge of Linux systems administration.
• Experience with scripting and automation using Python, Bash, or similar languages.
• Experience supporting databases that power modern SaaS applications at scale.
• Understanding of application-layer database interactions, including ORM-generated SQL and query optimization principles.
• Ability to design and build internal tooling and automation that leverages AI/LLMs—such as self-service database assistants, query-optimization helpers, or runbook automation—and to define quality gates for AI-generated database changes.
• Experience defining standards, guardrails, or policy-as-code that other engineers adopt.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction and hiring.
• Familiarity with monitoring, observability, and alerting tools.
• Strong troubleshooting skills with the ability to diagnose issues across application, infrastructure, and database layers.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to align and influence stakeholders across distributed teams.
• Professional proficiency in English.

What Makes You Stand Out

• Experience supporting high-growth SaaS platforms at scale.
• Expertise with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.
• Experience managing multi-tenant architectures.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform.
• Experience working within Kubernetes-based environments.
• Experience working in Ruby on Rails environments, including ActiveRecord query optimization and PostgreSQL performance tuning.
• Familiarity with Rails migration strategies, schema management, and database deployment best practices.
• Experience supporting Sidekiq or other background job processing systems at scale.
• SnowPro certification, or advanced Snowflake experience with features such as data sharing, dynamic data masking, or ingestion tooling (e.g., Snowpipe / OpenFlow).
• AWS certifications, such as AWS Certified Database Specialty or Solutions Architect.
• Experience leading database modernization, migration, or cloud transformation initiatives.
• Experience representing engineering on an architecture review board or similar technical governance body.
• Experience defining org-wide database standards or a database platform/IDP strategy.
• Passion for automation and reducing operational toil.
• A proactive mindset focused on continuous improvement and operational excellence.