Staff Database Reliability Engineer – PostgreSQL

Location: Remote OR Hybrid from Amsterdam

About Stream

Stream powers real-time Chat Video Activity Feeds and AI Moderation for billions of end-users across thousands of apps from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users while delivering highly reliable low-latency services and a great developer experience.

The Role

Were looking for a hands-on Database Engineer to own PostgreSQL as a production system at Stream. Youll work directly with a small senior team and be responsible for the performance reliability and operability of the databases that store and serve data for Streams entire real-time platform.

This is a deep hands-on engineering role. Youll spend your time in query plans storage internals and the operational realities of running databases under heavy continuous load not administering them from a distance.

Why This Role Exists

We have 35-40 different DBs (largest one is 15tb) with large writing throughput. To save hosting costs we plan on migrating from AWS RDS to self-hosted Postgres on Kubernetes.

For that we need help from someone who:

What Youll Work On

• Performance and internals diagnose and resolve performance issues from the query down to the storage engine: indexing strategy query planning vacuum and bloat management and tuning under sustained write load.

• Reliability and operations own the operational characteristics of our Postgres fleet including backup replication and high availability as we take on more responsibility for running these systems ourselves.

• Scaling the data layer work on sharding partitioning and the architectural decisions that keep the database performant as data and traffic grow.

Beyond that youll set standards for how we run Postgres collaborate closely with application engineers to connect database behaviour to real access patterns and help shape the long-term direction of our data infrastructure.

Core Technologies

Go PostgreSQL CockroachDB Redis Kubernetes AWS

Required

• Deep PostgreSQL expertise you understand the internals (MVCC vacuum and bloat the query planner indexing replication) well enough to debug hard problems and reason from first principles not from defaults.

• Production ownership at scale youve run Postgres behind high-traffic services with large datasets and high write throughput and youve felt and fixed the failure modes that come with that.

• Self-managed databases youve operated Postgres yourself (on Kubernetes bare-metal or VMs) owning backup replication and high availability. Managed services alone arent enough background for this role.

• Sharding and scaling youve sharded a real Postgres workload not only table partitioning.

• An engineering mindset you can read and write code and you connect database behaviour to application access patterns rather than treating the DB in isolation.

• Judgement alongside AI tooling we use AI heavily in our workflows; you should be able to use it well and know when its wrong. Deep internals knowledge is what lets you tell the difference.

Strong Plus

• Multi-tenant database experience

• Experience pushing PostgreSQL beyond conventional relational use (large semi-structured or blob data flexible query interfaces)

• Messaging social or other high-write event-heavy storage backgrounds

• Connection pooling logical replication / CDC or Postgres-compatible distributed SQL (CockroachDB Yugabyte)

• Open source contributions to database or infrastructure tooling

What Were Not Looking For

Being explicit saves everyone time:

• Managed-service-only backgrounds if your Postgres experience is entirely RDS/Aurora/Cloud SQL with no self-managed ownership the core of this role will be unfamiliar.

• Application developers above the query layer if youve used Postgres through an ORM but never read a query plan or tuned the database this isnt the right fit.

• DBAs who dont code administration alone isnt enough; this is an engineering role.

• Analytics / data-warehouse specialists this is high-write transactional (OLTP) Postgres not Redshift/Snowflake/Spark/ETL work.

• AI skepticism we wont spend time convincing you AI is worth adopting.

Benefits (Netherlands-based employees):

• Generous compensation

• Company equity

• 28 days PTO Dutch public holidays

• Pension scheme

• Learning & Development budget

• Commute reimbursement to Amsterdam or company bike

• Fitness stipend

• Access to open-source project work

Benefits are adjusted per country of residence for remote hires.

Why Stream

• High scale/ difficult engineering

• Default alive. Startup growth opportunity with healthy revenue

• Strong engineering culture. Engineering is what makes us succeed

• All managers are hands-on and capable engineers

• Edge network of servers around the world

• Great opportunity to learn and grow

• Raised $58M from leading VCs (Felicis Ventures Notable Capital Techstars Arthur Ventures) including backers like Dick Costolo (01 Advisors ex-CEO of Twitter) Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog) Tom Preston-Werner (Co-Founder of GitHub) Nicolas Dessaigne (Co-Founder of Algolia)

Hybrid office policy: applicants based (or relocating to) one of our office locations are expected to work according to the applicable local office attendance policy.

Equal opportunity employer statement: Stream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race color religion age sex national origin disability status genetics protected veteran status sexual orientation gender identity or expression or any other characteristic protected by federal state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment including recruiting hiring placement promotion termination layoff recall transfer leaves of absence compensation and training.

Note for external recruiters: We currently have this role covered and do not accept unsolicited agency resumes. We are not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.

Required Experience:

Staff IC