Staff Database Engineer

We are looking for a Staff Database Engineer to take primary ownership of the reliability, availability, and recoverability of Chaturbate’s large PostgreSQL environment. Our PostgreSQL estate operates at significant scale, spans multiple production clusters, holds terabytes of data, and has tables containing billions of rows. These databases support critical user experiences and revenue-generating features, and must be extremely reliable, support rapid recovery capabilities, and provide consistently high performance.

You will work as part of the Site Reliability Engineering team to prevent database incidents, strengthen high availability and disaster recovery, improve confidence in our backup and restore procedures, and ensure that maintenance and upgrades can be completed safely. When incidents occur, you will provide the PostgreSQL expertise needed to diagnose complex failures, restore service, and prevent recurrence.

This is an opportunity to take meaningful ownership of a business-critical database environment at substantial scale. You will have the autonomy to identify reliability risks, establish operational standards, influence architecture, and shape how PostgreSQL is operated as the platform continues to grow.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building resilient data infrastructure, not just administering it.

What You’ll Do

• Own the day-to-day reliability and operational health of Chaturbate’s PostgreSQL environment.
• Identify and proactively address database reliability, performance, and scalability risks before they impact production.
• Improve high availability, replication, backup, restore, and disaster recovery capabilities.
• Lead the response to database incidents and implement improvements that prevent them from recurring.
• Plan and execute PostgreSQL upgrades, migrations, and maintenance with minimal service disruption.
• Monitor and tune database performance across high-volume, latency-sensitive, high-write workloads.
• Build better observability, alerting, automation, and operational runbooks in partnership with SRE.
• Plan for continued growth in data volume, storage, compute, WAL generation, replication bandwidth and latency needs.
• Review database architecture for new products and significant engineering changes, providing guidance on schema design, queries, migrations, scalability, and operational risk.
• Develop operational standards, automation, and best practices for PostgreSQL across the engineering organization.
• Document the environment and help SRE engineers build stronger PostgreSQL knowledge.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for critical database incidents.
• Analyze query execution plans, indexing strategy, autovacuum behavior, table bloat, checkpoint tuning, and storage efficiency for multi-terabyte database clusters.

What You Bring

• 10+ years of hands-on experience operating PostgreSQL in large-scale, business-critical production environments.
• Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL reliability, including replication, failover, backup, recovery, and high availability.
• Experience in preventing, diagnosing, and resolving complex production database incidents.
• Experience in planning and safely executing PostgreSQL upgrades, migrations, and maintenance.
• Strong understanding of PostgreSQL internals, including WAL, autovacuum, indexing, locking, query planning, and connection management.
• Experience supporting high-volume workloads, large data sets, or rapidly growing databases.
• Strong Linux knowledge and an understanding of how infrastructure affects database performance and reliability.
• Ability to automate operational work through scripting, configuration management, or infrastructure tooling.
• Experience building monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and reliable incident-response practices.
• Strong communication and judgment, with the ability to work effectively across SRE and product engineering teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Patroni, PgBouncer, or comparable PostgreSQL high-availability and connection-pooling technologies.
• Experience designing or testing multi-region database recovery strategies.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, and modern observability platforms.
• Experience building PostgreSQL operational knowledge within an SRE or infrastructure organization.
• Experience supporting high-traffic consumer platforms, real-time systems, or revenue-critical transaction flows.
• Experience with the Python Django web framework.

United States Remote $195,000 - $227,500 a year - Full-time, Pulled from the full job description

• 401(k) matching
• Vision insurance
• 401(k) 5% Match
• Dental insurance
• Life insurance
• Unlimited paid time off
• Employee assistance program, What You’ll Get
• Fair and competitive base salary
• Fully Remote Optional
• Health, Vision, Dental, and Life Insurance for you and any dependents, with policy premiums covered by the Company
• Long & Short term disability insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Annual Year-End Company Closure
• Optional 401k with 5% matching
• 12 Paid Holidays
• Paid Lunches in-office, or if Remote, a $125/week stipend via Sharebite
• Employee Assistance and Employee Recognition Programs
• And much more!

The Base Salary range for this position is $195,000 - $227,500 USD. This range reflects base salary only and does not include additional compensation or benefits. The range displayed reflects the minimum and maximum range for a new hire across the US for the posted position. A candidate’s specific pay will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the candidate’s job-related skills, relevant education, training, experience, certifications, and abilities of the candidate, as well as other factors unique to each candidate.

Multi Media LLC is the company behind Chaturbate, one of the most heavily trafficked live streaming platforms in the world. We support a global network of independent content creators and millions of real-time viewers, delivering interactive video at scale. Our infrastructure handles complex broadcasting, low-latency streaming, and high-engagement user experiences. All live, all the time.

We’re building a platform where creators can express themselves freely and grow their communities, where viewers discover and interact with creators they’re drawn to, and where the team behind it is challenged, trusted, and responsible for shaping the experience of millions of users around the world. We value people who take initiative, stay curious, and care deeply about the quality and impact of what they build.