Senior PostgreSQL DBA & Performance Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Performance Bonuses

Stock Purchase Options

Medical/Vision/Dental Benefits

401k Plan

Paid Vacation & Sick Days

Gym Membership Reimbursement

Commuter Benefits

Pet Insurance

Wellness & Mental Health Programs

Volunteer Days Off

Daily catered lunch in office

Job summary

tastytrade, headquartered in Chicago, seeks a Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer to own Postgres health and performance across on‑prem and AWS RDS environments. This hands-on role collaborates with developers on migrations, optimizes queries, and leads incident response and DR planning.

You’ll partner with engineering teams to design scalable, highly available Postgres clusters, implement robust backup/restore, and drive automation and documentation to improve

Qualifications

• Deep PostgreSQL expertise with the query planner and EXPLAIN output interpretation.
• Experience with indexing strategies across B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN, and partial/indexed views.
• Proven ownership of backup/restore programs and DR testing.

Responsibilities

• Own performance for high-volume OLTP Postgres workloads: query plan analysis, index strategy, statistics and autovacuum tuning, connection pooling, partitioning, and schema design review.
• Design, deploy, and operate highly available clusters using Patroni, including replication topology, failover and switchover procedures, and regular testing.
• Own the backup and recovery program end to end — backup tooling, retention, PITR, and routine restore verification with documented RTO/RPO.
• Manage Postgres in both on-prem and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL environments, including parameter groups, extension availability, failover behavior, and upgrade paths.
• Plan and execute major-version upgrades and large migrations with minimal downtime.
• Review application code and migrations written in Ruby (Rails/ActiveRecord) and Java (JDBC), catching N+1 queries, unsafe DDL, missing indexes, and lock-taking migrations before production.
• Build and maintain observability for the database tier: metrics, slow query capture, lock and wait-event analysis, and capacity forecasting.
• Automate routine operations and contribute to runbooks; participate in on-call rotation and postmortems.
• Write and maintain internal documentation: runbooks, architecture decisions, upgrade playbooks, and developer guidance.

Skills

PostgreSQL expertise

Query plan analysis

Indexing strategy

Replication & failover

Patroni

Backup/restore (pgBackRest, Barman)

Linux fundamentals

Ruby/Java/Python familiarity

Incident response

Documentation practice

Job description

tastytrade, headquartered in Chicago, seeks a Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer to own Postgres health and performance across on‑prem and AWS RDS environments. This hands-on role collaborates with developers on migrations, optimizes queries, and leads incident response and DR planning.

You’ll partner with engineering teams to design scalable, highly available Postgres clusters, implement robust backup/restore, and drive automation and documentation to improve