Sr. Database Engineer, Postgre SQL/AWS Aurora

Socket.dev

Seattle (WA)

On-site

USD 140,000 - 150,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

401(k) with company matching

Paid time off

7 Paid company holidays

4 Floating holidays per-year

Life Insurance and AD&D

Job summary

ABC Legal Services in Seattle is seeking a Database Engineer to own, optimize, and scale the PostgreSQL/Aurora data layer behind Skye, its core legal-services platform. You will tackle large schemas, high-volume queries, and production issues to improve reliability and performance.

Collaborate with Infrastructure, Software Development, and Data Science teams to implement robust data-access patterns, backups, and migration hygiene while safeguarding PII and sensitive data.

Qualifications

5+ years of experience with production relational databases
Strong PostgreSQL and AWS Aurora PostgreSQL experience
Strong SQL skills including joins, CTEs, and indexing
Experience with large, long-lived schemas and high-volume data
Ability to diagnose production issues and optimize queries and plans
Experience collaborating with application engineers on database-backed design
Attention to data access controls, PII, and release risk
Clear written communication of findings and trade-offs

Responsibilities

Serve as a PostgreSQL and AWS Aurora SME for Skye's operational DB
Manage and improve a large relational schema with hundreds of tables
Review migrations, indexing, grants, triggers, and hygiene
Triage production DB issues: slow queries, locks, replication lag
Improve query performance and indexing for large tables and dashboards
Automate routine maintenance and monitoring tasks
Support DB refresh, backups, and release workflows with Infra
Collaborate with Infra, Software, and Data Science teams on reliability and analytics
Ensure safe access patterns for reporting users and sensitive data
Work with accounting-related data flows when needed

Skills

PostgreSQL

AWS Aurora

SQL

Schema migrations

Performance tuning

Access control

Communication

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in engineering or software

Master's degree (preferred)

Tools

Linux

Bash

MyBatis/Spring

Metabase/BI tools

CloudWatch / pg_stat_statements

Job description

About ABC Legal Services: ABC Legal Service is proud to be the national leader in service of process. We are a team of 1000 and growing with offices in Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Brooklyn, Chicago, Washington DC, and more. Seattle is our home and headquarters. We’ve been successful in this unique business for over 30 years and we continue to advance our technology and business processes to remain years ahead of what our competition is able to offer. Our focus is to expand our technology lead, acquire and integrate less efficient competitors, and tap into new segments through an integrated inbound marketing and sales approach.

Job Overview: ABC Legal is looking for a detail-oriented Database Engineer to help own, improve, and scale the PostgreSQL database layer behind Skye, our core legal-services platform. Skye supports high-volume process serving, court filing, operational workflows, customer facing applications, mobile field work, integrations, reporting, billing and automation. Its primary operational database is PostgreSQL across all environments, with AWS Aurora reader/writer topology in production and major staging environments. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys deep database work: understanding complex schemas, reviewing migrations, tuning high-volume queries, diagnosing production issues, improving operational safety, and helping application engineers make better data-access decisions. Accounting, ERP, or NetSuite/Boomi experience is helpful because some important data flows touch billing and payments, but this is fundamentally a PostgreSQL/Aurora database engineering role.

What You’ll Do:

Serve as a PostgreSQL and AWS Aurora subject-matter expert for our internal system Skye’s operational database.
Manage and improve a large relational schema with hundreds of tables, high volume operational data, and substantial historical data.
Review database changes for correctness, performance, safety, indexing, grants, triggers, foreign keys, and migration hygiene.
Analyze and triage production database issues, including slow queries, lock contention, blocking transactions, runaway queries, replication lag, and performance regressions.
Improve query performance and indexing for large tables, reporting workloads, assignment/routing workflows, mobile API payloads, and internal operational dashboards.
Automate routine database maintenance and operational tasks, such as repacking, cleanup, monitoring checks, and recurring reports.
Support database refresh, backup, restore, staging, and release workflows in partnership with Infrastructure.
Collaborate closely with Infrastructure, Software Development, and Data Science teams on reliability, performance, reporting, analytics, and operational data needs.
Help maintain safe access patterns for reporting users, Metabase, developers, and sensitive/PII-bearing tables.
Work with accounting-related data flows when needed, including invoices, payments, billing accounts, vendor/payee data, and ERP integration tables.

What We’re Looking For:

5+ years of experience working with production relational databases (8+ years a plus).
Strong production experience with PostgreSQL, ideally including AWS Aurora PostgreSQL.
Strong SQL skills, including joins, CTEs, query plans, indexes, constraints, triggers, transactions, and lock behavior.
Experience investigating high-volume databases with large tables, long-lived schemas, and real production load.
Ability to distinguish intrinsic query cost from lock contention, blocking, bad plans, missing indexes, and application call-volume issues.
Strong attention to detail when reviewing schema migrations and operational changes.
Experience collaborating with application engineers on database-backed application design and performance.
Good judgment around access control, PII, production safety, and release risk.
Clear written communication for documenting findings, tradeoffs, and recommended fixes.
Bachelor's degree in engineering or software field preferred, Master's Degree is a plus.

Very Nice to Have:

Experience with Linux, Bash, scripting, cron, or other orchestration/automation tools used for database maintenance and operational workflows.
Java experience, especially in applications using MyBatis, Spring, or similar data access frameworks.
Experience with reporting workloads, BI tooling, Metabase-style access patterns, PostGIS, or geospatial query performance.
Experience with AWS monitoring tools, CloudWatch, RDS/Aurora Performance Insights, pg_stat_statements, pgAdmin, or similar observability tools.
Experience using AI coding agents such as Codex, Claude, or similar tools; at minimum, willingness to use AI-assisted development tools as part of day-to-day engineering work.
Secondary bonus: experience with NetSuite, Boomi, ERP / iPaaS integrations, accounting, billing, AR/AP, payments, invoices, credit memos, customer deposits, vendor payments, or working-table integration patterns.

We know that a company's success starts with its employees. We also know that an individual's success starts with the right career opportunity. Join our team today!