Senior Platform Engineer, Datastores

Rootly; Toronto; On-site; CAD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Early equity

Medical, dental, vision coverage

3 weeks vacation + unlimited sick days

Home office stipend $500

Job summary

Rootly is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer focused on datastores to own PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and Redis performance under load. You will pair, review, and create runbooks to raise the team's depth while not owning the datastores alone.

You’ll collaborate with platform engineers and product teams to shape how features store and query data, and participate in on-call rotations as part of Platform. Bring deep datastore expertise and a bias toward reliability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and running production systems with focus on datastore performance and reliability.
• Experience supporting multi-tenant systems at scale and isolating tenants.
• Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, locking, MVCC, indexing, and pooling.
• Experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale.
• Experience with capacity planning and load testing for web services.
• Proactive problem solver; leaves behind reusable tools and docs.
• Writes production-grade software across application and database layers.

Responsibilities

• Own performance and reliability of PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and Redis in production.
• Fix lock contention, pooling limits, slow queries, and heavy fan-out.
• Lead capacity planning and load testing to know limits before incidents.
• Set standards for schema changes, migrations, indexing, and query patterns.
• Review data-heavy changes and share best practices.
• Build dashboards, runbooks, and alerts for datastore incidents.
• Collaborate on multi-region replication and recovery with infra team.

Skills

Datastore performance

Multi-tenant scaling

Production systems

Tools

PostgreSQL

OpenSearch

Redis

Kafka

DynamoDB

Rails

Sidekiq

AWS Lambda

Terraform

Job description

About Rootly

At Rootly, we are on a mission to be the go-to way companies respond when things go wrong, helping every organization be more reliable. We do this by building an industry-leading incident management platform that allows companies around the world to consistently and quickly resolve incidents. We are not simply transforming an industry, we are carving out a new multi-billion-dollar category ourselves and need incredible talent to achieve this ambitious goal together.

Customers love Rootly. Some of the fastest-growing companies around the world such as NVIDIA, DoorDash, Uber, Canva, Tripadvisor, Squarespace and more rely on Rootly to power their critical incident management process. They obsess over our delightful enterprise-ready platform and unique partnership model. See why our customers have reviewed us 5 stars on G2.

Investors love Rootly. We are backed by some of the most respected funds in the world from Y Combinator to operators like the CTO of Dropbox and GitHub. We'd be happy to disclose our entire funding and profitability picture live during the interview. As a culture we relentlessly put transparency first. We conduct monthly financial reviews as a team so everyone has a pulse on the health of the business and publish what we are building in our weekly changelog.

About The Role

As a Senior Platform Engineer focused on datastores, you'll be the team's expert on PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Kafka, and Redis. You'll find and fix the locking, pooling, and query problems that can slow Rootly down under load, and you'll raise the whole engineering team's depth through pairing, reviews, and runbooks rather than owning the datastores alone.

Like everyone on Platform, you'll also share responsibility for the platform as a whole and take your turn on call. You'll work closely with our platform engineering leader, and with product engineers to shape how their features store and query data.

What You'll Do

• Own the performance and reliability of PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and Redis in production.
• Find and fix lock contention, connection pooling limits, slow queries, and job fan-out that degrade under load.
• Lead capacity planning and load testing so we know our limits before a customer's worst day finds them.
• Set standards for schema changes, migrations, indexing, and query patterns, and build checks that catch problems before they ship.
• Review data-heavy changes from product teams and teach the patterns behind your feedback.
• Build the dashboards, runbooks, and alerts that let any engineer debug a datastore incident.
• Partner on multi-region data replication and recovery with the Infrastructure side of Platform.

What You'll Need

We care about impact, ownership, and technical judgement. Degrees and big-name logos are not required. What matters is your ability to execute, influence, and teach.

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years building and running production systems, with significant time on datastore performance and reliability.
• Experience supporting multi-tenant systems at scale, including tenant isolation, noisy-neighbour protection, and keeping one customer's traffic spike from degrading service for everyone else.
• Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals: locking, MVCC, query plans, indexing, vacuum, and connection pooling.
• Experience running OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale.
• Experience with capacity planning and load testing for web services.
• You fix the class of problem, not the instance, and leave behind tools and docs others use.
• You write production-grade software, and you're comfortable working in an application codebase, not only in the database.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Rails, ActiveRecord, and Sidekiq at scale.
• Experience with Redis as a queue and cache under heavy load.
• Experience with cross-region replication and database failover.
• Experience with Kafka or DynamoDB.

What Success Looks Like

By 6 To 12 Months You Will Have

• Fixed the top locking, pooling, and slow-query issues behind our historical SEV0 incidents.
• Established a load testing baseline and capacity plan, so we know our limits before customers find them.
• Put schema change and migration standards in place, backed by automated checks.
• Built dashboards, runbooks, and alerts that let any engineer on call debug a datastore incident.
• Spread datastore depth across the team, so reliability doesn't depend on any one person.

Our Tech Stack

• Backend: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Redis, Sidekiq, AWS Lambda, ECS, Kafka, DynamoDB
• Frontend: Turbo, Stimulus, ViewComponents
• Infrastructure: AWS, OpenTofu/Terraform (IaC), Datadog

Why Rootly?

We're not just another startup. We're building something category-defining and want teammates who crave ownership, love solving hard problems, and thrive in a high-bar, high-impact environment.

Here's What You Can Expect When You Join Rootly

• Competitive compensation and early equity in a fast-growing, venture-backed company.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 3 weeks of vacation, plus unlimited sick and mental health days, and a company-wide end-of-year shutdown to recharge.
• $500 stipend for home office setup.
• Unlimited token usage and access to AI tools.
• A fast-moving, high-impact environment where your leadership and ideas directly shape the future of the company.

This is a newly created vacancy, and we may hire more than one person to fill it.

As we build out the team, we may use AI to support parts of our interview process, like reviewing assessments, but it's a tool that helps our people, not a substitute for their judgement.

Accommodations are available on request at any stage of our recruitment process. Contact [e-mail] and we will work with you to meet your needs confidentially.

Rootly is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, record of offences, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by the Ontario Human Rights Code or applicable law.