Senior Database Platform Engineer
Job Description
[Up to c. $375k Comp Package (or equivalent) | Hybrid Working]
Role Overview
We’re partnering with a global multi-strategy investment firm that is rethinking how databases are delivered, operated, and consumed across the business. Rather than running fragmented, manually managed systems, the firm is building a cloud-native database platform that treats data services as reliable, self-service products. This role sits at the heart of that transformation. As a Senior Database Platform Engineer, you’ll help design and operate a Kubernetes-based database platform that supports both transactional and analytical workloads at scale. You’ll combine deep database expertise with modern infrastructure engineering practices - automating lifecycle management, enforcing consistency through code, and eliminating operational fragility across a diverse database estate. You’ll join a small, senior team distributed across Chicago, New York, and London, with real ownership, high technical standards, and the mandate to modernise how database engineering is done...
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate a database platform running on Kubernetes, focused on automation, resilience, and safe self-service
- Engineer declarative lifecycle management for multiple database engines, covering provisioning, upgrades, failover, and recovery
- Develop Kubernetes-native abstractions (operators, controllers, custom resources) to standardise how databases are consumed internally
- Implement highly available and fault-tolerant architectures across relational, analytical, and cloud data platforms
- Build and support modern analytical data patterns, including lakehouse-style architectures and federated query engines
- Define and maintain schema management workflows using version-controlled, repeatable migration tooling
- Establish GitOps-driven delivery pipelines for database infrastructure, configuration, and change management
- Create tooling to migrate workloads from legacy VM-based systems or managed cloud services onto the internal platform
- Embed security, access controls, and guardrails directly into the platform to ensure safe multi-tenant usage
- Partner closely with application engineers, data teams, and infrastructure groups to align platform capabilities with real workloads
What You’ll Bring…
- 7+ years of experience in database engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure roles operating data systems at scale
- Strong hands-on expertise with PostgreSQL and SQL Server, alongside experience supporting cloud-native platforms such as Snowflake
- Proven experience running stateful systems in production, with a strong understanding of availability, backup, recovery, and performance trade-offs
- Practical knowledge of Kubernetes beyond basic usage - including stateful workloads, controllers, and operational patterns
- Experience designing or operating lakehouse-style data platforms and query federation layers
- Solid programming capability (Python and/or Go) used to build automation, tooling, and platform services
- Experience working with Infrastructure-as-Code and Git-based delivery models
- Familiarity with observability for data platforms - metrics, health signals, and failure detection
- Confidence working across both transactional and analytical data systems, including modern columnar and key-value stores
- A platform mindset: you think in terms of guardrails, repeatability, and long-term operability rather than one-off fixes
- Comfortable operating in small, senior teams with high ownership and minimal hand-holding
- (Preferred) Exposure to Kubernetes operator development for databases or other stateful services
- (Preferred) Background migrating legacy database estates into cloud-native or containerised platforms
...
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