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Spreedly is an intelligent payments platform that enables merchants, platforms, and fintechs to own their payments strategy through a single API connecting to 150+ payment gateways and 40+ payment methods across 100+ countries. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Durham, NC, the company processes billions of dollars in annual transactions and is building infrastructure for the emerging agentic commerce era.
This Senior Database Engineer role focuses on optimizing and operating Spreedly's production database systems at scale. The position combines hands-on database performance tuning, architectural guidance, and operational ownership.
Key Responsibilities:
Improve Database Performance: Investigate current database setup to identify performance bottlenecks and reliability risks using instrumentation, code review, and staging tests. Find and improve slow-running queries, identify missing or inefficient indexes, and evaluate database settings. Diagnose distributed-database issues such as transaction contention, retries, hot ranges, and inefficient access patterns, partnering with application engineers to fix them at the source. Establish performance baselines to detect meaningful changes in workload behavior early.
Be the Database Subject-Matter Expert: Help engineering teams understand risks and trade-offs of significant changes before production deployment, including schema migrations, new access patterns, and configuration changes. Participate in design reviews for systems placing significant demands on the database, providing clear guidance on schema design, primary key selection, indexing, and transaction boundaries. Contribute database expertise to incident response and root-cause analysis, turning learnings into lasting fixes.
Own Database Practices: Develop safer migration procedures, documentation, and guidance so application teams can evolve data models independently. Take ongoing ownership of operational practices including version upgrade planning, backup/recovery validation against availability objectives, and cluster settings/sizing. Improve database observability so critical signals (latency, retries, contention, range health, capacity) are visible and actionable. Work with Cockroach Labs as a knowledgeable counterpart on the managed environment and help right-size the database footprint as the company grows.
Partner Across Engineering: Work closely with infrastructure, platform, and application engineers to improve database performance and availability. Mentor engineers on database troubleshooting, performance, and distributed-database concepts.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience in a role where operating and optimizing production databases was the primary job, not a side responsibility of application development
- Deep, hands-on experience managing distributed databases, including their performance and high-availability behavior
- Hands-on experience managing relational databases supporting business-critical production systems
- Track record of diagnosing database inefficiencies and delivering measurable improvements to queries, indexing, schema, or configuration
- Strong SQL skills and fluency with execution plans, transaction management, and the trade-offs of distributed SQL (replication, consistency, consensus, distributed transactions)
- Ability to assess the risk of a database change and explain technical trade-offs clearly to other engineers
- Independent approach to investigating unfamiliar systems, identifying priorities, and carrying improvements through to completion
- Considerate, collaborative working style with teams whose work depends on yours and whose expertise you depend on
Valued Additional Skills:
- 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 vendor 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
- Database capacity planning and cluster sizing experience, including multi-region topologies
- Building operational tooling or checks in Python, Go, or similar languages
- Familiarity with how ORMs (e.g., Rails ActiveRecord) shape database access patterns
- Cloud experience on AWS or Azure; database-focused cloud certifications are a plus
- Note: Neither CockroachDB nor PostgreSQL experience is a prerequisite if you bring the depth of distributed database management experience this role needs
