Principal Software Developer - Databases
$131,000–$131,000 year
RemoteAmer, West Sepik Province, Independent State of Papua New Guinea or Amer, Catalunya, Kingdom of Spain
Job Summary
Lead design and implementation of high-impact SRS platform capabilities including event platform CDC integration (Kafka), schema automation, Structured Record Access API, and fleet management tooling. Define technical direction for SRS sub-areas by establishing architecture standards, conducting design reviews, and raising the bar on team development practices. Continuously assess cloud platform needs at scale to identify risks and gaps, then drive the roadmap to close them. Own and improve fleet-wide operations for capacity management, monitoring, alerting, query tuning, load optimization, and data replication. Create and institutionalize best practices and health models for the database fleet using observability tooling and AWS automation. Build a network of storage champions across engineering groups to consult on storage readiness and risk while selecting training opportunities. Assume full responsibility for reliability through monitoring, runbooks, on-call response, and post-incident learning. Partner with SRS leadership to sequence work and make cross-team tradeoffs, drive migration initiatives, and mentor P2/P3 engineers.
Required Qualifications
- 6+ years of software engineering in a platform, infrastructure, or data engineering context
- 5+ years of Kubernetes architecture at scale
- 7+ years of Terraform experience
- 7+ years of experience with cloud data technologies
- Deep Postgres or DynamoDB experience at scale: fleet-level operations, not application-level use
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects end-to-end: design through production
- Hands-on Kafka or event streaming experience in production
- ORM experience at the framework or platform layer: you've built or extended ORM tooling to drive semantic eventing, not just consumed it
- Kubernetes CRD hands-on experience: designing or operating controllers/operators that manage platform resources
- Strong AWS background: IAM, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, ECS/EKS, multi-region
- Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and GitOps deployment experience
- Strong communication and organizational skills; you can influence outcomes across teams, groups, and leadership
Desired Qualifications
- Experience building or operating a managed Postgres platform
- Customer Managed Keys (CMK): AWS KMS key policy design, envelope encryption, or CMK rotation in a regulated environment
- Schema catalog, data governance, or data contract experience
- Liquibase or equivalent schema migration tooling experience
- Helm, ArgoCD, or Harness deployment pipeline experience
- Apigee, LLM proxy, or API gateway platform experience
- FedRAMP/IL4 compliance context in a cloud environment
- You're a self-starter, comfortable driving work across a distributed group of service owners on different teams
- You're a fearless problem-solver and model-driven thinker
- You embrace big challenges and apply rigorous yet efficient methods to your solutions
- You're results-driven, with a strong bias for action and a solid sense of accountability
- bonus if you've built CDC pipelines (Postgres binlog, DynamoDB Streams, Debezium)
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