10+ years of hands-on experience in database administration, database reliability engineering, or infrastructure engineering with PostgreSQL as your primary database, with demonstrated staff-level scope—you’ve set standards across teams, not just operated within one
Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge (required)—WAL mechanics, vacuum tuning, logical and physical replication, partitioning strategies, and the ability to debug production issues others can’t. PostgreSQL is our core database and deep fluency is non-negotiable
Track record of building migration governance systems—not just reviewing migrations, but designing the frameworks, tooling, and organizational processes that make safe migrations the default
Experience architecting database infrastructure for multi-region, high-availability environments—replication topologies, failover automation, and data consistency trade-offs at fleet scale
Deep fluency with database observability—you’ve built monitoring strategies using Datadog, pganalyze, or custom instrumentation, and you know which metrics actually predict incidents
Experience leading database major version upgrades (e.g., PostgreSQL 14 → 16) or sharding initiatives in production with zero downtime
Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority—you’ve written RFCs, set standards, and changed how an engineering organization thinks about database operations
Proficiency with cloud database services at scale (Azure Database for PostgreSQL, GCP Cloud SQL, or AWS RDS/Aurora) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi)
Clear communication across audiences—you can present a database architecture decision to the VP of Engineering and explain a migration risk to a junior developer with equal clarity