Spreedly is hiring a Senior Database Engineer to become the go-to database expert on our Reliability team. You'll improve the performance and reliability of our existing distributed database environment and help engineering teams make database changes safely.
This is a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports, and "senior" here means more than years of experience: you'll be the person the rest of engineering looks to on anything at the database layer. The opportunity is to shape how we manage and improve our databases, not to lead a migration. We already run CockroachDB, with infrastructure operated through Cockroach Labs' managed service. That means your focus is the part that's ours to own: workload, schema, queries, settings, capacity, and the practices around change.
Our Reliability team works across application engineering, infrastructure, and platform to improve monitoring, prevent incidents, and recover quickly when incidents happen. It isn't a textbook SRE team. It's a small, highly autonomous group focused on continuous improvement, with real room to see a problem, propose a fix, and carry it through within the team's priorities. Database availability and performance matter a great deal in a payments environment, and the improvements you make here show up directly in the reliability our customers depend on.
Responsibilities:
Investigate our current database setup to find performance bottlenecks and reliability risks, using instrumentation, code review, and staging tests where appropriate.
Find and improve slow-running queries, identify missing or inefficient indexes, and evaluate database settings against what the application actually needs.
Diagnose distributed-database issues such as transaction contention and retries, hot ranges, and inefficient access patterns, and partner with application engineers to fix them at the source.
Establish performance baselines so meaningful changes in workload behavior are visible early.
Be the database subject-matter expertHelp engineering teams understand the risks and trade-offs of significant changes before they reach production, including schema migrations, new access patterns, and configuration changes.
Participate in design reviews for systems that place significant demands on the database, and give clear guidance on schema design, primary key selection, indexing, and transaction boundaries.
Contribute database expertise to incident response and root-cause analysis, and turn what we learn into lasting fixes.
Own database practicesDevelop safer migration procedures, documentation, and guidance so application teams can evolve data models without needing you involved in every step.
Take ongoing ownership of operational practices, including planning version upgrades, validating backup and recovery against our availability objectives, and keeping cluster settings and sizing right for our workload.
Improve database observability so the signals that matter (latency, retries, contention, range health, capacity) are visible and actionable alongside our broader production monitoring.
Work with Cockroach Labs as a knowledgeable counterpart on our managed environment, and help us right-size our database footprint as we grow.
Partner across engineeringWork closely with infrastructure, platform, and application engineers to improve database performance and availability.
Mentor engineers on database troubleshooting, performance, and distributed-database concepts.
Requirements:
5+ years of experience in a role where operating and optimizing production databases was your primary job, not a side responsibility of application development.
Deep, hands-on experience managing distributed databases, including their performance and high-availability behavior.
Hands-on experience managing relational databases supporting business-critical production systems.
A track record of diagnosing database inefficiencies and delivering measurable improvements to queries, indexing, schema, or configuration.
Strong SQL skills and fluency with execution plans, transaction management, and the trade-offs of distributed SQL (replication, consistency, consensus, distributed transactions).
The ability to assess the risk of a database change and explain technical trade-offs clearly to other engineers.
An independent approach to investigating unfamiliar systems, identifying priorities, and carrying improvements through to completion.
A considerate, collaborative working style with teams whose work depends on yours, and whose expertise you depend on.
Additional Skills We Value:
Production experience administering CockroachDB at meaningful transaction volumes, including diagnosing contention, transaction retries, and hot ranges.
PostgreSQL administration experience.
Experience operating a managed database service and working effectively with the vendor's support and engineering teams.
Experience with zero- or minimal-downtime schema migrations on large, high-traffic tables.
Experience supporting payments, financial technology, or similarly availability-sensitive platforms.
Experience with database capacity planning and cluster sizing, including multi-region topologies.
Experience building operational tooling or checks in Python, Go, or similar languages.
Familiarity with how ORMs (for example, Rails ActiveRecord) shape database access patterns.
Cloud experience on AWS or Azure; database-focused cloud certifications are a plus.
Neither CockroachDB nor PostgreSQL experience is a prerequisite if you bring the depth of distributed database management experience this role needs.
We Offer Our US-Based Employees:
- Competitive salary + Equity
- Outstanding Medical and Dental benefits, including 100% employer-paid option
- Company-paid Life and Disability insurance
- Optional vision and supplemental insurance options, and various Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
- Open Paid Time Off policy + 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents
- Matching 401(k) plan (5% up to $5,000 yearly)
- $1,000 annual professional development stipend
- Monthly home working/digital lifestyle stipend, new MacBook, and one-time accessory reimbursement
- Access to company-paid professional coaching service
- Visits to HQ in Durham, North Carolina for remote employees
Spreedly provides an open payments platform. The platform’s connectivity provides payments performance. Key products and services include:
Connect — A unified API that integrates with hundreds of payment gateways, processors, and alternative payment methods worldwide, including digital wallets. Merchants access the global payments ecosystem through one connection.
Vault — A PCI-compliant secure repository for payment methods. Merchants store card data once and reuse it across any payment service, reducing PCI scope and protecting cardholder data at scale.
Optimize — Workflow-driven routing and retry logic that directs each transaction to the best-performing gateway in real time. On average, 7.9% of failed transactions succeed immediately when retried on a secondary gateway. This is where merchants recover lost revenue and increase authorization success rates.
Protect — A flexible fraud and authentication layer, incorporating advanced fraud tools and 3DS. Following Spreedly's acquisition of Dodgeball in September 2025, fraud orchestration and payment optimization now operate within the same platform.
Resolve — Centralized management and reporting that reduces operational silos, strengthens security, and improves billing control across a merchant's entire payment operation.
More Coming Soon! - Keep your eyes peeled for a new product launch by EOY '26
Similar Jobs
What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene
Key Facts About San Francisco Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Meta
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
- Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
- Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
