Staff Database Engineer

We are looking for a Staff Database Engineer to provide technical leadership for a global cloud data environment supporting large-scale, distributed business operations in Utah. This contract-to-hire position will focus on building and improving secure, highly available database platforms across AWS while partnering with engineering teams to strengthen performance, resilience, and scalability. The role is ideal for someone who brings deep database expertise, strong automation skills, and a practical approach to supporting modern data pipelines and enterprise applications.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and ongoing improvement of multi-region database environments across AWS to support globally distributed workloads.

• Administer and enhance a mix of relational and non-relational platforms, including Snowflake, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Cosmos DB, and MongoDB.

• Drive database migration efforts between cloud platforms, regional deployments, and legacy environments while minimizing operational risk.

• Improve system performance through thoughtful indexing, query refinement, capacity planning, and scalable data architecture decisions.

• Strengthen availability and cost efficiency by tuning database platforms for enterprise-scale throughput, resiliency, and low-latency access.

• Support data ingestion and ETL workflows by collaborating on services and orchestration tools used across cloud-based pipeline ecosystems.

• Establish secure connectivity patterns, access controls, encryption standards, and secrets management practices for database services.

• Build and maintain backup, recovery, and disaster preparedness processes, including point-in-time restore capabilities and continuity planning.

• Expand monitoring and operational visibility using cloud and third-party observability tools, and take ownership of production incident response when needed.

• Create and maintain technical documentation such as runbooks, operational procedures, and architecture decision records to support long-term platform reliability

• 8+ years of experience in database engineering, data engineering, or a closely related technical discipline.

• Strong hands-on expertise with AWS database technologies and solid Python skills for scripting, automation, and tooling.

• Proven experience managing platforms such as DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Snowflake, and other NoSQL or cloud-native database systems. Couchbase experience is helpful.

• Ability to work on-call shifts and provide support outside business hours, as needed

• Strong understanding of distributed systems principles such as replication, partitioning, consistency models, and latency tradeoffs.

• Demonstrated success optimizing queries, designing indexing strategies, planning capacity, and controlling infrastructure costs at scale.

• Experience implementing production monitoring, alerting, and observability for critical database environments.

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