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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 operations, and deliver better client outcomes.
You will join the Cloud Infrastructure & Platform team as a Staff Database Administrator, owning the reliability, performance, and resilience of a multi-terabyte Aurora PostgreSQL estate that serves as 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 initiatives: migrate production clusters to Aurora Global Database, instrument replication lag against RTO/RPO commitments, and own failover, failback, and recovery drills.
- Drive database segmentation by carving critical domains out of shared clusters into dedicated instances with isolated read paths, reducing blast radius during failovers and upgrades.
- Architect for order-of-magnitude scale increases: capacity modeling, tenant-aware partitioning and sharding strategies, per-domain read replicas, continuous aggregates, materialized views, connection pooling, and load testing.
- Own the upgrade program, planning and executing major-version PostgreSQL upgrades across the fleet with minimal downtime.
- Manage change data capture and data movement infrastructure (Debezium, Kafka/MSK, AWS DMS), 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 cross-functional partners (platform, data, security, product teams), with significant autonomy over design and implementation decisions. This is one of two staff-level database engineering roles, offering real influence over the company's data architecture roadmap.
The role is hybrid, requiring three days per week onsite in the San Francisco or Culver City office.
