Database Administrator

Weekday AI (YC W21); Chennai District; On-site; INR 14,000,000 - 20,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Weekday AI in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, seeks a Database Engineer with deep PostgreSQL expertise to design, scale, and automate production database infrastructure in cloud-native environments. You will handle storage engines, replication, MVCC, and performance tuning while building Python tooling for health checks and operational guardrails.

The role requires 3+ years of hands-on experience in database engineering, strong knowledge of SQL/NoSQL internals, and the ability to guide application teams on

Qualifications

• 3+ years of engineering experience with hands-on database duties.
• Deep PostgreSQL expertise plus familiarity with another SQL/NoSQL DB.
• Strong Python skills for automation and tooling.
• Experience scaling production databases in cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, operate, and scale production database systems across SQL and NoSQL.
• Debug and prevent complex concurrency issues and long transactions.
• Advise teams on safe database access patterns and retries.
• Develop automation for backups, migrations, and DR strategies.
• Implement monitoring for replication lag, slow queries, and outages.
• Build tooling for performance diagnostics and health checks.

Skills

PostgreSQL

Distributed systems

Database internals

Python

Tools

MySQL

MongoDB

Kubernetes

SQL/NoSQL architectures

Job description

Job Description:

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀

𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲: 𝗥𝘀 𝟭𝟰𝟬𝟬𝟬𝟬𝟬𝟬 - 𝗥𝘀 𝟮𝟬𝟬𝟬𝟬𝟬𝟬 (𝗶𝗲 𝗧𝗗𝗨 𝟭𝟮-ℝ𝟣 𝗟𝗣𝗔)

Experience: 3+ yrs

Location: Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Job Type: Full-time

We are looking for a strongDatabase Engineerwith deep expertise in PostgreSQL, distributed systems, database internals, and production database operations. The role focuses on designing, scaling, automating, and optimizing database infrastructure for high-throughput, cloud-native environments.

The ideal candidate will have a strong understanding ofstorage engines, replication, transactions, concurrency, reliability, performance optimization, and data consistency, combined with strong Python skills for building production-grade automation and operational tooling.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, operate, optimize, and scale production database systems across SQL and NoSQL environments.
• Debug and prevent complexconcurrency issues, including deadlocks, lock contention, starvation, and long-running transactions.
• Advise application teams on safe database access patterns, includingidempotency, retries, backoff strategies, and concurrency controls.
• Develop a deep understanding of database storage and replication internals, includingB-trees, LSM structures, page layouts, WAL/redo/undo, checkpoints, compaction, MVCC, and storage engines.
• Design and implement database backup, restore, upgrade, migration, anddisaster recoverystrategies.
• Analyze query planner behavior, statistics, cardinality estimation, and query performance bottlenecks.
• Develop effective indexing strategies while considering write amplification, storage, and performance trade-offs.
• Build database reliability practices, preventative controls, and automated remediation mechanisms.
• Implement monitoring and alerting forreplication lag, lock contention, cache health, slow queries, storage growth, and failover events.
• Lead database incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
• Build production-gradePython automation and toolingfor health checks, failover validation, backup/restore verification, consistency checks, and diagnostics.
• Automate online schema changes, safe rollout and rollback workflows, and operational guardrails.
• Develop automation for performance diagnostics, including query-plan capture and workload analysis.
• Build scalable tooling capable of efficiently processingmillions of records or events, with strong attention to time and space complexity.
• Guide data-modeling decisions across relational, document, and key-value databases.
• Evaluatenormalization vs. denormalization, secondary indexing, partitioning, hot-spot mitigation, throughput planning, TTL, archiving, and data lifecycle policies.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• 3+ years of relevant engineering experiencewith strong hands-on database engineering responsibilities.
• Deep expertise inPostgreSQLand strong understanding of at least one additional SQL or NoSQL database such asMySQL, MongoDB, or MariaDB.
• Strong foundation indistributed systems, including CAP, replication, consistency, failure handling, and consensus fundamentals.
• Deep understanding oftransactions, isolation levels, MVCC, locking, concurrency, storage engines, and database internals.
• Strong proficiency inPython, with experience building production-grade automation, diagnostics, and operational tooling.
• Hands-on experience operating, troubleshooting, tuning, and scalingproduction databases.
• Strong debugging and performance-analysis skills, with the ability to reason from metrics, logs, traces, and low-level system behavior.
• Good understanding ofLinuxand common command-line tools.
• Ability to evaluate technical trade-offs acrosslatency, consistency, durability, throughput, cost, and performance.
• Strong first-principles approach to understanding database behavior under high load and failure conditions.
• Experience designing reliable automation, safe database migrations, and operational guardrails.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence application and infrastructure teams.
• Demonstrated ownership, technical judgment, and ability to mentor other engineers.

Nice to Have:

• Experience withmulti-region databases, global tables, and cross-region failover.
• Familiarity withAWS, production support, and on-call environments.
• Understanding of networking concepts such asVPCs, subnets, security groups, CIDR, and peering.
• Experience withKubernetesor self-managed database infrastructure.
• Experience building internal database platforms, self-service tooling, policy-as-code, or safe migration frameworks.

Requirements: