Senior PostgreSQL DBA & Database Engineer (Hybrid, Chicago)

tastylive; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Performance Bonuses

Stock Purchase Options

401k Plan

Paid Vacation Days

Paid Sick Days

Pet Insurance

Wellness & Mental Health Programs

Charitable Donation Matching

Daily catered lunch when in the office

Full kitchen with snacks and beverages

Shuttle to/from Metra

Job summary

tastylive in Chicago seeks a Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator/Database Engineer to own health, performance, and durability of high-throughput Postgres clusters on bare metal, VMs, and AWS RDS. This hands-on role involves query analysis, index tuning, failover drills, code reviews, and thorough documentation.

You will manage Patroni-based clusters, backups with pgBackRest/Barman, cross-environment operation, and major migrations with minimal downtime, while contributing to incident

Qualifications

• Deep PostgreSQL expertise with the query planner and EXPLAIN analysis.
• Hands-on indexing across B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN, and covering/indexing concepts.
• Experience with Patroni-managed clusters and real failover scenarios.
• Ownership of backup/restore programs (pgBackRest, Barman) including production restores.
• Experience operating Postgres at scale in self-managed and AWS RDS environments.
• Strong Linux fundamentals and performance tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own performance for high-volume OLTP Postgres workloads and tuning.
• Design, deploy, and operate highly available clusters with Patroni and regular testing.
• Manage backup and recovery end-to-end with verification of RTO/RPO.
• Handle Postgres in on‑prem and Amazon RDS environments and migrations.
• Plan major version upgrades and large migrations with minimal downtime.
• Review application code and migrations in Ruby and Java for N+1 queries and unsafe DDL.
• Build observability: metrics, slow queries, lock analysis, capacity forecasting.
• Automate routine operations; contribute to runbooks and docs.
• Lead on-call incident response and postmortems to prevent recurrence.
• Create developer-facing guidance and upgrade playbooks.

Skills

PostgreSQL expertise

Query planner

Indexing strategies

Replication

Patroni

Backups

Linux basics

Ruby & Java

Documentation

Incident response

Tools

Patroni

pgBackRest

Barman

Job description

tastylive in Chicago seeks a Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator/Database Engineer to own health, performance, and durability of high-throughput Postgres clusters on bare metal, VMs, and AWS RDS. This hands-on role involves query analysis, index tuning, failover drills, code reviews, and thorough documentation.

You will manage Patroni-based clusters, backups with pgBackRest/Barman, cross-environment operation, and major migrations with minimal downtime, while contributing to incident