Staff Database Engineer

TL;DR

Staff Database Engineer (PostgreSQL): Define how a global fleet of PostgreSQL databases operates and evolves across hirify.global’s legal AI platform, with an accent on multi-region scaling, migration governance, and fleet-level reliability. Focus on building migration review frameworks and tooling, diagnosing replication/performance issues, and leading incident response with durable process improvements.

Location: San Francisco, CA (in-person). Relocation assistance available for new employees.

Salary: $190,720–$286,080 USD (offers equity)

Company

hirify.global builds an enterprise platform for legal and professional services powered by agentic AI.

What you will do

• Own migration governance end-to-end: review workflow, CI gate checks, automated rollback procedures, and fleet-wide deployment sequencing.
• Drive architecture and scaling for a global PostgreSQL fleet: multi-region replication design, capacity planning, sharding/partitioning, and observability.
• Ensure reliability and performance at fleet level: replication health monitoring, query optimization, vacuum tuning, connection management, and alerting.
• Build self-service tooling and developer guardrails: migration dry-runs, schema diff previews, automated health checks, and performance regression detection.
• Lead database incident response: triage production issues, run post-incident reviews, and turn lessons learned into process/tooling fixes.

Requirements

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in database administration, database reliability engineering, or infrastructure engineering with PostgreSQL as the primary database; staff-level scope (setting standards across teams).
• Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge (required): WAL mechanics, vacuum tuning, logical/physical replication, partitioning strategies, and production debugging.
• Proven track record building migration governance systems (frameworks, tooling, and organizational processes).
• Experience architecting multi-region, high-availability database infrastructure (replication topologies, failover automation, consistency trade-offs).
• Deep fluency in database observability (e.g., Datadog, pganalyze, or custom instrumentation) and metrics that predict incidents.
• Experience leading major version upgrades and/or sharding initiatives in production with zero downtime.

Nice to have

• Strong software engineering skills (Python, Go, or similar) to build production-grade automation/tooling.
• Exposure to vector databases/embedding storage or adjacent systems (Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka) for AI/ML workloads in regulated industries.
• Experience building or leading a database engineering function from scratch (charter, hiring, operating model).

Culture & Benefits

• In-person work model based in San Francisco, CA.
• Relocation assistance for new employees.
• Compensation includes a base salary range and offers equity.
• Work focuses on high ownership, fast execution, and raising engineering standards for database safety and performance.

Hiring process

• Interviews focused on PostgreSQL/database reliability, migration governance, multi-region architecture, and incident leadership.
• Technical evaluation of production experience (upgrades, replication, observability, and tooling/automation).
• Discussion of how you influence technical direction and communicate across engineering levels.