Position: Senior Database Engineer Location: Kraków, Poland Working mode: Initially remote; once the Kraków office is ready, 3-4 days per week onsite
About our client Our client is an Israeli sports-tech company combining advanced data engineering, AI/ML and mathematical modelling to build high-performance real-time sports analytics solutions. The company processes large volumes of real-time data across sports including football, basketball, baseball and American football, transforming it into predictions and actionable insights. Its technology supports data-driven organizations operating in environments where speed, scalability and data accuracy are critical. The company is now building its new R&D team in Kraków, giving engineers the opportunity to join at an early stage and help shape the technical foundations of the new organization.
The Role
As a Senior Database Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, optimizing and scaling high-performance database infrastructure supporting millions of transactions and real-time data flows. You will work with transactional databases, document databases, Kafka-based streaming and analytical data lakes, with a strong focus on performance, reliability and data consistency. A key part of the role will be ensuring that financial and transactional data remains accurate under high concurrency and large-scale workloads. You will combine hands-on database engineering with automation, cloud infrastructure and close collaboration with the wider data and engineering teams.
Key Responsibilities
- Design efficient database schemas and low-latency data access patterns for a microservices environment.
- Analyze and optimize query performance, including indexing, execution plans and high-concurrency bottlenecks.
- Design and implement table partitioning, data retention and archival strategies for large transactional and time-series datasets.
- Move historical and less frequently accessed data to data lake solutions such as Snowflake and S3.
- Design and operate real-time Change Data Capture (CDC) pipelines using Kafka and Debezium.
- Monitor database health, performance and availability, including alerting and proactive identification of throughput or data consistency issues.
- Design and maintain database backup, recovery, encryption and access-control mechanisms in cloud environments.
- Build and maintain database CI/CD pipelines covering schema migrations, version control and automated deployments.
- Automate database operations, ETL workflows and data-quality/anomaly detection processes using Python or similar scripting languages.
- Work closely with engineering and data teams to improve the scalability and reliability of the overall platform.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of hands-on experience in Database Engineering, Database Administration or a similar role.
- Strong experience with large-scale relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL and/or MySQL, handling high transaction volumes.
- Experience working with high-scale document databases, particularly DocumentDB or similar technologies.
- Strong understanding of indexing strategies, query optimization, execution plans and transaction isolation levels.
- Practical experience with database partitioning and data retention/archival strategies.
- Experience operating cloud databases, particularly AWS RDS/Aurora or GCP Cloud SQL.
- Hands-on experience with real-time data streaming, CDC and Kafka, or high-volume ETL processes.
- Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for databases and schema migrations.
- Strong scripting/automation skills, preferably with Python.
- Ability to troubleshoot complex performance and scalability issues in high-concurrency environments.
- Strong English communication skills (C1); Polish is not required.
- Experience in fintech, iGaming or another highly regulated, transaction-heavy environment is a nice-to-have.
What We Offer
- Opportunity to join a new R&D organization in Kraków and help shape its technical foundations from the beginning.
- Primarily employment based on an employment contract (UoP), with B2B cooperation also planned as an option later.
- Initially fully remote work, followed by a hybrid model with 3-4 days per week from the Kraków office once the office is ready.
- Opportunity to work with high-volume transactional and real-time data systems serving millions of active users.
- International environment and collaboration with experienced technical teams and company leadership.
- Competitive compensation and the equipment required to perform the role.
- Opportunity to work on challenging problems around database scalability, data consistency, performance and real-time processing.