Sr. Database Engineer, Postgre SQL/AWS Aurora

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.

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.