Sr. Database Architect

Mitek Systems, Inc.; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 55,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

Mitek Systems, Inc. is seeking a Senior Database Architect to provide technical leadership for design, performance, and reliability of production database environments.

You will partner with software engineers, platform engineers, product managers, and other stakeholders to evaluate existing architectures and establish best practices for database engineering. The role emphasizes optimizing high-volume OLTP systems with PostgreSQL, assessing environments, and driving improvements in schema

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, or related field.
• 5+ years of experience as a Database Engineer, Data Engineer, or similar role.
• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining high performant, scalable OLTP systems.
• Hands-on experience with SQL (Postgres, Snowflake).
• Strong data modeling, data warehouses, and lakehouse architectures.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, performance, scalability, and reliability of production databases.
• Optimize OLTP databases with emphasis on PostgreSQL; drive schema, indexing, and partitioning improvements.
• Guide engineering teams on scalable database-backed features and best practices.
• Improve production readiness: testing, release validation, monitoring, backups, DR and incident response.

Skills

SQL & PL/pgSQL

Data Modeling

Performance Tuning

Python development

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, or related field

Tools

PostgreSQL

Snowflake

dbt

Airflow

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

As the Senior Database Architect, you will provide technical leadership for the design, performance, scalability, and reliability of our production database environments. You will partner closely with Software Engineers, Platform Engineers, Product Managers, and other technical stakeholders to evaluate existing database architectures, identify opportunities for improvement, and establish database engineering best practices across our products.

A primary responsibility of this role is to optimize and maintain our high-volume OLTP databases, with a strong emphasis on PostgreSQL. You will assess existing environments, identify performance and scalability bottlenecks, and drive improvements across schema design, indexing, partitioning, query performance, replication, and database configuration. You will also provide guidance to engineering teams as they design and implement new database-backed features.

You will help strengthen production readiness by establishing and improving practices around performance testing, release validation, monitoring, alerting, backup and recovery, high availability, access controls, and incident response. You will play a key role in troubleshooting complex production issues, performing root-cause analysis, and ensuring database changes are thoroughly tested before deployment.

This role requires someone who can combine deep hands-on database expertise with strong technical judgment and communication skills and someone who can assess an existing environment, make practical recommendations, and partner with engineering teams to implement scalable, reliable solutions.

What You Need (Required Knowledge, Skills & Abilities):

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, or related field
• 5+ years of experience as a Database Engineer, Data Engineer, or similar role

Core Data Engineering & Architecture

• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining high performant, scalable OLTP systems.
• Hands-on experience and advanced knowledge of SQL (e.g., Postgres, Snowflake)
• Strong experience with data modeling, data warehouses, and lakehouse architectures
• Experience designing and implementing scalable data architectures, including batch and streaming pipelines
• Experience building ELT pipelines with dbt and Snowflake
• Intermediate to advanced Python development skills

Database Optimization & Reliability

• Experience assessing and improving existing database systems, including performance tuning (indexing, query optimization, partitioning) and data quality remediation
• Strong understanding of database internals and transactional systems
• Experience implementing backup, recovery, and high-availability strategies

Performance Testing & Release Validation

• Experience designing and implementing performance/load testing frameworks for data systems
• Knowledge of benchmarking, regression testing, and release validation processes
• Experience building automated testing pipelines to ensure data quality and system performance across deployments

Production Operations & Data Reliability

• Experience defining and maintaining production database processes, including monitoring, alerting, and incident response
• Familiarity with observability tools and practices (logging, metrics, tracing)
• Strong understanding of SLAs, SLOs, and data reliability best practices

Tools & Platforms

• Experience with AWS data technologies (Glue, Kinesis, Lambda)
• Experience with orchestration tools (Airflow)
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform)
• Knowledge of the Software Development Lifecycle

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, especially for data systems
• Experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Knowledge of encryption, anonymization, and tokenization
• Experience with open table formats and data catalogs
• Familiarity with data observability tools (e.g., Monte Carlo, Datadog, Prometheus)

Who You Are (Soft Skills):

• Detail-oriented, with a strong data quality mindset
• Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills with a proactive approach to system reliability
• Self-starter with a bias toward ownership and continuous improvement
• Comfortable bringing structure and best practices to ambiguous or legacy environments
• Thrives in a fast-paced, startup-oriented, team-focused culture
• Positive, collaborative, and energetic attitude
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to clearly explain complex technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences

£55,000 - £75,000 a year

We are proud to offer competitive salary ranges aligned to industry standards. Please note that our ranges are representative and individual compensation specifics may vary based upon experience level, professional competencies and geographic differentials.