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Fam is India's first payments app for users aged 11+, offering UPI and card payments through FamCard and FamX. The company is backed by Elevation Capital, Y Combinator, Peak XV (Sequoia Capital India), and notable angels. This Senior DBA role owns uptime, performance, scaling, disaster recovery, and audit readiness for mission-critical databases serving millions of users on a regulated fintech platform.
Key Responsibilities:
You will lead database reliability and operations across relational (PostgreSQL), NoSQL (DynamoDB, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis), and analytical engines in both on-premise and AWS cloud environments. Specific duties include:
• Own availability SLOs for production databases; lead incident response and root-cause analysis for database outages, driving fixes to closure.
• Participate in 24x7 on-call rotation, including off-hours and weekends, serving as escalation point for database incidents from SRE and engineering teams.
• Profile production workloads using slow query logs, pg_stat_statements, Performance Schema, and cloud metrics; optimize through indexing, query rewrites, partitioning, connection pooling, read replicas, and sharding.
• Analyze OLTP vs. analytical access patterns; make evidence-backed decisions on database engine choice, instance sizing, and topology.
• Design, test, and execute disaster recovery strategies including backup, point-in-time recovery, cross-AZ and cross-region replication with documented RTO/RPO metrics and periodic DR drills.
• Own database controls for RBI, NPCI, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS compliance; manage access reviews, encryption at rest/in transit, audit logging, data retention, and data localization evidence; serve as point person for auditor walkthroughs.
• Right-size database instances, reserved capacity, and storage tiers; optimize DynamoDB capacity modes; retire unused replicas and snapshots; report spend against usage.
• Operate and tune CDC pipelines (Debezium, Kafka Connect, AWS DMS) including replication slots, binlog/WAL retention, schema changes, and lag monitoring.
• Manage S3 buckets for backups, archives, and data lakes; analyze access patterns and set lifecycle, tiering, and retention policies.
• Operate and tune distributed query engines (Trino, Starburst, StarRocks, BigQuery) including cluster sizing, resource groups, caching, and query governance.
• Define and enforce standards for schema design, naming, indexing, migrations, access roles, and PII handling; review schema changes before production deployment.
• Own version upgrades, patching, parameter changes, and certificate rotation with zero or minimal planned downtime.
• Prepare database infrastructure for new product launches: capacity planning, load testing, migration runbooks, and rollback procedures.
• Collaborate across backend, data, SRE, security, and non-technical stakeholders (compliance, finance, product) to translate database risk into actionable decisions.
Requirements:
Must Have:
• 5–8 years in database administration or database reliability engineering, with at least 3 years on high-traffic, customer-facing production systems.
• Deep production expertise in PostgreSQL or PostgreSQL-based systems, including replication internals, vacuum/InnoDB tuning, and upgrades on both self-managed and RDS/Aurora.
• Production experience with at least two of: DynamoDB, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis.
• Proven track record of DR drills, multi-AZ/multi-region replication, and restoring from backup under pressure.
• Direct involvement in regulatory or third-party audits (RBI, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 2, or equivalent), including producing evidence and closing findings.
• Hands-on database cost optimization with measurable savings.
• Strong SQL, query plan analysis, and scripting in Python or Bash for automation.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform or CloudFormation) and monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Datadog, or similar).
• Solid understanding of database security: IAM and role design, encryption, secrets management, audit logging.
• Willingness to be part of 24x7 on-call rotation with prior experience handling production database incidents off-hours.
Good to Have:
• Operating Debezium/Kafka Connect CDC in production.
• Running Trino, Starburst, StarRocks, or BigQuery clusters at scale.
• S3 lifecycle and storage tiering design for backups and data lakes.
• Databases on Kubernetes (operators such as CloudNativePG, Percona, K8ssandra).
• Experience in fintech, payments, or banking, especially UPI or card systems.
• Familiarity with Apache Iceberg, DeltaLake, or Lakehouse table formats.
• Analyzing slow queries from BI tools (Superset, Metabase, Power BI); tracing slow dashboard rendering to query patterns, missing indexes, or unsuitable data models; fixing at source or through aggregates and caching.
• CI/CD for database changes: migration tooling (Flyway, Liquibase, Alembic), automated schema linting, and review gates enforcing design standards.
• Certifications: AWS Database Specialty, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Cassandra.
