Staff Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

TL;DR

Staff Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure: Architecting and managing the full lifecycle of distributed database systems (TiDB) on Kubernetes at scale, ensuring high availability, data consistency, and operational excellence. Focus on coordinating complex, zero-downtime migrations from monolithic to distributed architectures and driving efficiency improvements across storage infrastructure.

Location: Remote (USA). Employees based in Denver, San Francisco, or New York City are expected to work from the office approximately 2-3 days per week.

Salary: $200,000-$270,000 /yr (dependent on location and experience).

Company

hirify.global is a product company focused on providing payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR solutions to small businesses across the country.

What you will do

• Architect, deploy, and manage the full lifecycle of distributed database systems (TiDB) on Kubernetes, ensuring high availability and data consistency.
• Coordinate complex, zero-downtime migrations from monolithic to distributed architectures, including vertical sharding.
• Define and drive efficiency improvements across storage infrastructure through query optimization and caching strategies.
• Build reliable automation to ensure data consistency, integrity, and security across distributed systems.
• Continuously improve operational excellence and reduce on-call burden with sustainable solutions.
• Mentor engineers on best practices for operating complex, self-hosted distributed systems.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience building and scaling large-scale infrastructure systems.
• Hands-on experience building and operating distributed databases on Kubernetes (TiDB, CockroachDB, Vitess, Citus preferred).
• Deep expertise in distributed data systems, horizontal sharding, partitioning strategies, and distributed transaction management.
• Proven experience coordinating complex, zero-downtime migrations affecting production systems at scale.
• 5+ years of AWS experience with RDS, Aurora, Redis/ValKey, Kafka, and infrastructure optimization at scale.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify technical complexity and collaborate across teams.
• Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment, leveraging AI tooling to enhance infrastructure operations.

Nice to have

• Experience with service extraction and vertical sharding from monolithic architectures.
• Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission to grow the small business economy by handling payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR.
• Supports over 400,000 small businesses across the country.
• Committed to building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers served.
• Proud to be an equal opportunity employer, committed to diversity and inclusion.
• Provides reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.