Senior Database Engineer

Investigate our current database setup to find performance bottlenecks and reliability risks, using instrumentation, code review, and staging tests where appropriate.

Find and improve slow-running queries, identify missing or inefficient indexes, and evaluate database settings against what the application actually needs.

Diagnose distributed-database issues such as transaction contention and retries, hot ranges, and inefficient access patterns, and partner with application engineers to fix them at the source.

Establish performance baselines so meaningful changes in workload behavior are visible early.

Help engineering teams understand the risks and trade-offs of significant changes before they reach production, including schema migrations, new access patterns, and configuration changes.

Participate in design reviews for systems that place significant demands on the database, and give clear guidance on schema design, primary key selection, indexing, and transaction boundaries.

Contribute database expertise to incident response and root-cause analysis, and turn what we learn into lasting fixes.

Develop safer migration procedures, documentation, and guidance so application teams can evolve data models without needing you involved in every step.

Take ongoing ownership of operational practices, including planning version upgrades, validating backup and recovery against our availability objectives, and keeping cluster settings and sizing right for our workload.

Improve database observability so the signals that matter (latency, retries, contention, range health, capacity) are visible and actionable alongside our broader production monitoring.

Work with Cockroach Labs as a knowledgeable counterpart on our managed environment, and help us right-size our database footprint as we grow.

Work closely with infrastructure, platform, and application engineers to improve database performance and availability.

Mentor engineers on database troubleshooting, performance, and distributed-database concepts.

Production experience administering CockroachDB at meaningful transaction volumes, including diagnosing contention, transaction retries, and hot ranges.

PostgreSQL administration experience.

Experience operating a managed database service and working effectively with the vendor's support and engineering teams.

Experience with zero- or minimal-downtime schema migrations on large, high-traffic tables.

Experience supporting payments, financial technology, or similarly availability-sensitive platforms.

Experience with database capacity planning and cluster sizing, including multi-region topologies.

Experience building operational tooling or checks in Python, Go, or similar languages.

Familiarity with how ORMs (for example, Rails ActiveRecord) shape database access patterns.

Cloud experience on AWS or Azure; database-focused cloud certifications are a plus.

Neither CockroachDB nor PostgreSQL experience is a prerequisite if you bring the depth of distributed database management experience this role needs.

Competitive salary + Equity

Outstanding Medical and Dental benefits, including 100% employer-paid option

Company-paid Life and Disability insurance

Optional vision and supplemental insurance options, and various Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)

Open Paid Time Off policy + 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents

Matching 401(k) plan (5% up to $5,000 yearly)

$1,000 annual professional development stipend

Monthly home working/digital lifestyle stipend, new MacBook, and one-time accessory reimbursement

Access to company-paid professional coaching service

Visits to HQ in Durham, North Carolina for remote employees

Spreedly provides an open payments platform. The platform’s connectivity provides payments performance. Key products and services include:

Connect — A unified API that integrates with hundreds of payment gateways, processors, and alternative payment methods worldwide, including digital wallets. Merchants access the global payments ecosystem through one connection. Vault — A PCI-compliant secure repository for payment methods. Merchants store card data once and reuse it across any payment service, reducing PCI scope and protecting cardholder data at scale. Optimize — Workflow-driven routing and retry logic that directs each transaction to the best-performing gateway in real time. On average, 7.9% of failed transactions succeed immediately when retried on a secondary gateway. This is where merchants recover lost revenue and increase authorization success rates. Protect — A flexible fraud and authentication layer, incorporating advanced fraud tools and 3DS. Following Spreedly's acquisition of Dodgeball in September 2025, fraud orchestration and payment optimization now operate within the same platform. Resolve — Centralized management and reporting that reduces operational silos, strengthens security, and improves billing control across a merchant's entire payment operation. More Coming Soon! - Keep your eyes peeled for a new product launch by EOY '26