Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer (PostgreSQL)

Location: Chicago, Illinois — Hybrid. The office is located in Chicago's West Loop.

Base salary: $150,000–$180,000 per year. Discretionary performance bonus: 8–12% of base salary.

Company

IG North America includes tastytrade and related brands, combining trading technology and retail brokerage products with the backing of FTSE 100 fintech IG Group.

What you will do

• Own performance for high-volume PostgreSQL OLTP workloads, including query plans, indexing, statistics, autovacuum, connection pooling, partitioning, and schema design.
• Design, deploy, and operate highly available Patroni-managed clusters, including replication, failover, switchover, and disaster recovery exercises.
• Own backup and recovery operations, including retention, point-in-time recovery, restore verification, and documented RTO/RPO.
• Operate PostgreSQL across self-managed on-premises or virtual-machine environments and Amazon RDS, while planning upgrades and large migrations with minimal downtime.
• Review Ruby on Rails/ActiveRecord and Java/JDBC application code and migrations for query, indexing, locking, and DDL risks.
• Build database observability and automation, participate in on-call incident response, write postmortems, and maintain operational and developer documentation.

Requirements

• Deep PostgreSQL expertise, including EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS), query planning, and advanced indexing strategies.
• Production experience with Patroni-managed clusters, including handling a real failover.
• Proven ownership of backup and restore programs using tools such as pgBackRest or Barman, including a production restore under pressure.
• Experience operating PostgreSQL at scale in both self-managed on-premises/VM/bare-metal and Amazon RDS environments.
• Strong Linux fundamentals covering filesystem and I/O behavior, memory, hugepages, systemd, networking, and performance tooling.
• Working proficiency in Ruby and Java, enough Python literacy to review and modify code, and excellent written communication and documentation skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with PgBouncer, infrastructure as code, configuration management, or Kubernetes-hosted PostgreSQL operators.
• Experience with active-active multi-site architectures or logical-replication-based zero-downtime migrations.
• Contributions to PostgreSQL or its ecosystem tooling.
• Familiarity with internal tooling, including gascan.

Culture & Benefits

• Lean, collaborative environment emphasizing autonomy, pragmatism, experimentation, and impact.
• Performance bonuses and stock purchase options.
• Medical, vision, dental, 401k, paid vacation, and paid sick leave.
• Gym reimbursement, in-building gym, commuter benefits, pet insurance, wellness programs, and charitable donation matching.
• Catered lunch, snacks, beverages, and shuttle service to and from Metra when working in the office.