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Senior PostgreSQL Database Reliability Engineer

Nodal Exchange

Job Location:

Tysons Corner, VA - USA

Yearly Salary: $ 170000 - 210000

Posted: 3 July 2026 (30+ days ago)

Application Deadline: 30 September 2026

Vacancies: 1 Vacancy

Job Summary

Senior Postgres Database Reliability Engineer
Tysons Corner VA (DC Metro Area) - will consider remote hiring from select states

Nodal Exchange is a derivatives exchange providing price credit and liquidity risk management to participants in the North American commodity markets. Nodal Exchange is a leader in innovation having introduced the largest sets of environmental and electric power futures and options contracts in the world. All transactions on Nodal Exchange (power environmental and natural gas) are cleared through its wholly owned clearing house Nodal Clear using its award-winning portfolio margining methodology. Nodal Clear also clears a broad set of crypto futures contracts for Coinbase Derivatives Exchange. As leaders in innovation Nodal Exchange and Nodal Clear have built in-house most of the trading and clearing platforms that fuel our business. Nodal Exchange is part of the EEX Group which is in turn part of the Deutsche Börse Group.

We are now looking for talented innovative individuals to join our team based in the Tysons Corner VA (DC Metro area).

The Opportunity

Every trade on one of North Americas largest power futures exchanges runs through PostgreSQL. Every settlement every margin calculation every risk assessment. This isnt a database that supports the businessit is the business.

Were hiring a Database Reliability Engineer who can own our data layer end to end. Not someone who monitors dashboards and runs backupssomeone who understands WAL internals thinks in replication topologies and has opinions about how data infrastructure should evolve. Someone who sees what we have today and already has ideas about where it needs to go.

Youll work inside a small high-impact IT organization at a CFTC-regulated commodities exchange and clearing house. The systems you build and operate directly underpin billions of dollars in traded contracts. There is no abstraction layer between you and the work that matters.

Key Responsibilities

What Youll Own

Production PostgreSQL infrastructure across the full lifecycle: architecture deployment replication monitoring performance tuning backup/recovery and capacity planning
Streaming replication and high-availability configurations that meet the uptime expectations of a regulated financial exchange
Query and system-level performance analysisdiagnosing slow queries optimizing execution plans tuning sharedbuffers workmem and autovacuum not just reading pgstat output but knowing what to do about it
Backup and disaster recovery strategy using tools like Barman including point-in-time recovery testing and validation
Data architecture evolution: modernizing data warehouse and reporting infrastructure building ETL pipelines and designing data flows that scale with the business
Data services across the organization: test data management data obfuscation data modeling and supporting data needs for development QA and business teams
Operational support including on-call rotation for after-hours production database emergencies

What We Expect

Were not looking for someone who needs to be told what to do. We need someone who assesses the landscape identifies whats broken or missing proposes solutions and drives them to completion. The right person hits the ground fast and builds trust through results.

Skills Knowledge and Expertise

Required

5 years hands-on PostgreSQL administration in production environmentsnot just dev/test not just managed RDS
Deep understanding of PostgreSQL internals: WAL mechanics MVCC vacuum processing the query planner and optimizer connection handling and lock management
Proven experience with physical and logical replication: setup monitoring failover and troubleshooting split-brain scenarios
Strong SQL performance tuning skills: reading EXPLAIN ANALYZE output identifying indexing strategies understanding join algorithms and resolving locking contention
Solid Linux systems administration (we run Ubuntu)comfortable with systemd filesystem performance memory management and networking fundamentals
Experience with backup/recovery tools (Barman pgBackRest or equivalent) and tested disaster recovery procedures
Experience building and maintaining ETL pipelines and data transformation processes
Ability to work autonomously in a small team where youre expected to own problems from identification through resolution
Strong communication skillsyou can explain a replication topology to a developer or a data availability timeline to a business stakeholder
Bachelors degree in Computer Science Information Systems Mathematics or a related field

Highly Valued

Experience operating databases in regulated or financial services environments where uptime and audit trails are non-negotiable
Hands-on AWS experience (EC2 RDS S3 networking)we run a hybrid on-prem/cloud infrastructure
Infrastructure-as-code skills: Ansible and/or Terraform for automated repeatable database deployments
Python scripting for automation tooling and data pipeline development
Experience with data obfuscation and masking techniques for non-production environments
Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus Grafana pgWatch or similar)
Experience with cloud migrationmoving database workloads from on-premises to AWS
Contributions to PostgreSQL community conference talks or published writing on database engineering topics

Why This Role

Your work directly supports a critical piece of U.S. energy market infrastructurethis isnt a CRUD app backing a SaaS product
Small team large scope: youll have real ownership and architectural influence not just ticket duty
In-house platforms mean you work directly with the engineers who build the systems your databases serve
Part of the Deutsche Börse Groupglobal exchange operator with institutional stability
A leadership team that understands database engineering at a technical level and will invest in doing things right

Compensation

Salary Range: $170000 - $210000 per year base salary when annualized

Pay Transparency Notice: The salary range is based on the D.C. metro area. The successful candidates starting salary will vary depending on permissible non-discriminatory factors including but not limited to qualifications skills and experience. Nodal also offers a wide range of benefits and perks for full-time employees which may include target bonuses.

Benefits

Nodal Employee Benefits and Perks:

Nodal Exchange LLC does not discriminate on the basis of race color religion sex gender sexual orientation gender identity or expression pregnancy parental status marital status citizenship national origin age disability genetic information military status veteran status physical or mental health hairstyle or any other characteristic protected by federal state or local law with respect to recruitment hiring training promotion or in any other terms and conditions of employment. Nodal Exchange is an E-verify participant.

Required Experience:

Senior IC

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