Staff Database Engineer

owner; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; CAD 198,000 - 269,000; Full time

Job summary

Owner is seeking a Staff Database Engineer to own data storage at scale for product teams. You will decide where data lives, drive migrations, and build platform primitives used across engineering.

The role is 100% remote, with a focus on working across the product stack in a large, global organization. You will collaborate with product engineering and platform teams to scale data access patterns and performance.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building product-facing databases and OLTP patterns.
• Strong PostgreSQL expertise with performance tuning and migrations.
• Solid software engineering skills and ability to ship production code.

Responsibilities

• Lead migrations of product workloads and scale data infrastructure.
• Build reusable data-platform primitives for teams to use.
• Collaborate with product engineers and platform teams to evolve the data stack.
• Expand data platform to support caching, search, and event streaming.

Skills

Database systems

PostgreSQL

OLTP optimization

Schema design

Software engineering

Tools

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Redis

Terraform

AWS

Job description

About Owner

Owner is the AI-native system local business owners use to succeed, starting with restaurants.

We’re building the system that replaces the many tools owners use to run their business.

It powers everything from the restaurant’s website, online ordering, CRM, POS, and more.

Product philosophy

Most small business software makes owners do the work to get what they want: sales growth and profit growth. Owner does the work for them agentically.

Our system drives demand, converts it, and helps operators run their business day to day. As it improves, the business improves with it.

Using Owner should feel like having a team of great operators, engineers, and marketers working for you.

Our vision

We’re starting by helping independent restaurants succeed online.

But it’s not just restaurants that need our help. Most local businesses are struggling with these same problems. Huge technology corporations are taking their customers, bleeding their profits, and making it hard for them to survive.

Once we nail the solution for restaurants – we’ll scale it into every other local business type.

In the future we envision, tens of millions of local business owners will use our technology to succeed in the digital age.

Our traction

Since 2020, we've generated tens of millions in revenue and processed over a billion dollars of online orders. 1 in 5 Americans have used an Owner.com website.

More importantly, we’ve helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees.

Our team

Our team is now in the low hundreds. We’ve got top talent from the most successful companies in SMB software, including: Shopify, HubSpot, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Rappi, Faire and Stripe.

Where we work

Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto. For a few of our roles we prioritize in-person collaboration at one of our office locations. Most of our teammates are distributed throughout the globe. Please review the role description and discuss with your recruiter for more details on location!

We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Database Engineer to help product teams store and access data effectively at scale. You will be the default place product engineers turn to for \"which database should this live in?\" and \"will this access pattern hold up?\" This means leading large projects like migrations and building the platform engineers interact with. You will be driving the largest, load‑bearing changes to our data infrastructure. This is a hands‑on, software‑engineer‑first role. It is not a BI, data‑warehousing, or analytics‑engineering role — that work lives with our BizOps and BI teams.

This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada.

The impact you'll have

• Lead the migration of product workloads




• Give product engineers a clear home for \"where should this data live and how should I access it?\"




• Build reusable primitives — data-sync utilities, ORM best practices, and access‑pattern / schema / index review — so teams stop reinventing patterns.




• Expand the product‑data platform over time into caching, search, and event streaming.

Who you'll work with

• Product Engineering Teams




• Platform / Infrastructure Teams




• This role has company‑wide impact and will partner cross‑functionally across the entire engineering organization.

What we're looking for

• Hands‑on experience working with databases inside the product — owning OLTP access patterns, indexing, query optimization, and schema design as part of building user‑facing applications




• Comfortable both writing code in the product stack and reasoning carefully at the database layer




• Deep expertise with a major relational engine (Postgres strongly preferred) in high‑volume production; experience migrating workloads (e.g., MongoDB → Postgres) a strong plus




• Expertise in schema design, indexing, query optimization, and zero‑downtime migrations on large, live tables




• Experience scaling systems through significant traffic and data growth, in a domain where understanding access patterns at scale is a survival skill — e.g. advertising analytics, fintech / trading systems, large‑scale consumer SaaS, or marketplaces




• Strong software engineering ability — writes, reviews, and ships production code, not SQL alone




• Flexible problem solving




• Strong written and verbal communication skills




• Deep sense of personal ownership and accountability




• Builder mentality

Nice to Haves

• Experience building shared platform primitives — data-sync tooling, ORM best practices, caching (Redis), search, or queues / event streaming




• Experience with payments or financial data




• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform), and observability/performance tooling

Notice - Employment Scams

Communication from our team regarding job opportunities will only be made by an Owner team member with an @owner.com email address.

We do not conduct interviews over email or chat platforms, and we will never ask you to provide personal or financial information such as your mailing address, social security number, credit card numbers or banking information. If you believe you are being contacted by a scammer, please mark the communication as \"phishing\" or “spam” and do not respond.