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Altruist is a fintech platform transforming wealth management by building AI-powered tools for financial advisors. The company partners with advisors nationwide to help them grow, optimize resources, and deliver superior client outcomes.
You will join the Cloud Infrastructure & Platform team as a Staff Database Administrator, owning the reliability, performance, and resilience of Altruist's multi-terabyte Aurora PostgreSQL estate—the system of record for hundreds of thousands of brokerage accounts, millions of positions, and hundreds of thousands of daily trades.
Key responsibilities include:
• Own the production PostgreSQL estate end-to-end across clearing, broker-dealer, and internal platform workloads, managing capacity, performance, availability, and cost.
• Lead multi-region disaster recovery: convert production clusters to Aurora Global Database, instrument replication lag against RTO/RPO commitments, and own documented failover, failback, and recovery drills.
• Drive database segmentation by carving critical domains out of shared clusters into dedicated ones with independent read paths, reducing blast radius and enabling faster failover and upgrades.
• Architect for order-of-magnitude growth: capacity modeling, tenant-aware partitioning and sharding, per-domain read replicas, continuous aggregates, materialized views, connection pooling, and load testing.
• Own the upgrade program: plan and execute major-version upgrades across the fleet with minimal downtime, keeping engine versions current.
• Manage change data capture and data movement (Debezium, Kafka/MSK, AWS DMS) for throughput, lag, and correctness, re-architecting single-threaded replication into parallel, partitioned pipelines.
• Raise standards on schema-change governance: review migration standards, index and locking strategies, and implement automated guardrails to catch unsafe changes before production.
• Partner with security and compliance on encryption, row-level security, least-privilege access, and SOC 1 / regulatory evidence.
• Serve as senior escalation point for database incidents, converting each into durable fixes, runbooks, or alerts.
• Build automation and AI-assisted tooling to make routine database work self-serve for product engineers; mentor across the organization on data modeling, query design, and operating databases at scale.
You will work directly with engineering leadership and partner with platform, data, security, and product teams. The role carries significant autonomy for design and implementation, with real influence over the company's data architecture roadmap. This is one of two staff-level database engineering positions.
The role follows a hybrid schedule with three days per week onsite in Culver City or San Francisco.
