Principal Database Engineer

As a Principal Database Engineer you will set the technical direction for our database platforms and partner with engineering teams to ensure scalability reliability security and cost efficiency. This is not a traditional DBA role. Instead you will design build and automate cloud-native database solutions that power our products and internal systems at scale. You will join our Database Engineering team and act as a senior technical leader hands-on with architecture and automation while also mentoring others and influencing how we approach data infrastructure across the company.

What Youll Do

• Own the data platform: Design implement and evolve database systems (Aurora RDS Redshift etc.) that meet performance resiliency and compliance requirements.
• Automate relentlessly: Build infrastructure-as-code CI/CD pipelines for database changes and self-service tooling for developers.
• Enable scalability: Architect solutions that support growth high availability and disaster recovery in a multi-account AWS environment.
• Champion observability: Implement monitoring alerting and performance tuning strategies to ensure proactive issue detection and resolution.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with application engineers cloud engineers and security to align database practices with organizational goals.
• Drive modernization: Lead the migration from legacy systems to cloud-first platforms ensuring minimal disruption and long-term maintainability.
• Mentor and guide: Elevate the skills of the Database Engineering team sharing best practices and setting technical standards.

• Proven experience as a Senior or Principal Database Engineer with expertise in multiple cloud-native databases (MySQL Primary Focus Oracle SQL Server PostgreSQL)
• Strong hands-on skills with AWS data services (Aurora Redshift RDS S3).
• Deep understanding of database performance query optimization indexing partitioning and replication strategies.
• Strong background in automation and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform CloudFormation or CDK).
• Proficiency in at least one of the following languages: TypeScript Python C# or Go with the ability to navigate existing codebases and build new tooling for deployment as standalone applications or serverless functions (e.g. AWS Lambda).
• Experience with observability stacks (Datadog CloudWatch or similar).
• Strong grasp of security compliance and cost optimization in cloud environments.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with user access management systems (SSO SCIM SAML OIDC)
• Exposure to data pipelines ETL or event-driven architectures (Kinesis Kafka).
• Knowledge of security principles such as Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) and Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)
• Familiarity with encryption strategies for data at rest and in transit (e.g. KMS TLS customer-managed keys envelope encryption)
• Awareness of compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS SOC 2 HIPAA) and how they affect data platform design