Database Lead - PostgreSQL

Technical Skills

• 6+ years of database development experience, with at least 5 years focused on PostgreSQL and 2+ years in a lead or senior role.
• Proven experience as a database lead or senior developer on large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS applications in the cloud.
• In-depth knowledge of PostgreSQL architecture and internals.
• Expert SQL and PL/pgSQL programming, including complex queries, functions and stored procedures.
• Strong data modelling skills across normalised transactional schemas, with experience in financial, ledger or other high-integrity transactional data.
• Expertise in performance tuning, including query optimisation, indexing and partitioning.
• Hands-on experience implementing multi-tenant isolation, including row-level security.
• Experience designing and operating highly available PostgreSQL: replication, failover, backup and recovery, point-in-time recovery and disaster recovery.
• Experience with managed PostgreSQL services on a major cloud platform, preferably Azure.
• Working knowledge of connection pooling and connection management.
• Experience managing version-controlled schema migrations through CI/CD pipelines.
• Scripting in Python and/or shell for automation and monitoring.
• Solid understanding of database security, including access control, encryption, auditing and protection of personal and financial data.
• Takes end-to-end ownership of the data layer and balances sound architecture with delivery speed.
• Leads by example: sets standards, runs design reviews and mentors developers.
• Diagnoses complex performance and data-integrity issues methodically.
• Communicates trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Good to have:

• Experience with Azure cloud services.
• Experience supporting analytics, reporting or AI data workloads.
• Experience scaling PostgreSQL for high data volumes.
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code and DevOps practices.
• Exposure to Node.js-based applications.
• Experience in accounting, fintech or other financial software.
• Exposure to security and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001.

Duties and responsibilities

• Translate business requirements and non-functional requirements (NFRs) into database designs with measurable acceptance criteria.
• Design PostgreSQL solutions that meet agreed targets for performance, scalability, availability, security and recoverability.
• Define data models, schemas, constraints and configurations that protect data integrity.
• Design data models for financial and transactional records, including immutable audit trails, precise monetary handling and reconciliation controls.
• Define the multi-tenant data isolation strategy, such as row-level security and tenant-aware partitioning and prevent cross-tenant data access.
• Design for data residency, retention and multi-region deployment where regulatory or contractual requirements apply.
• Build and maintain database objects: tables, indexes, views, functions, stored procedures and triggers.
• Analyse execution plans and optimise queries, indexing, partitioning and database configuration.
• Ensure correctness under concurrency through appropriate isolation levels, locking strategies and idempotent processing.
• Design reliable data integration patterns with application and event-driven services, such as the transactional outbox and idempotent ingestion of external data.
• Plan and run data migration, transformation and loading, including validation and reconciliation.
• Design storage and retrieval for AI features, including vector embeddings, while keeping tenant isolation intact.
• Enable change data capture and replication to analytics and machine learning platforms without degrading transactional performance.
• Support data quality, lineage and protection of sensitive data used in analytics and AI workloads.
• Work with cloud operations and DevOps teams to design, implement and test high availability and disaster recovery against agreed RTO and RPO targets.
• Define and regularly test backup, restore and point-in-time recovery procedures.
• Monitor performance, investigate bottlenecks and concurrency issues, and lead root-cause analysis and remediation.
• Run capacity planning and validate scalability under expected and peak workloads.
• Implement least-privilege access, encryption at rest and in transit, and database auditing.
• Work with security and compliance teams to provide controls and evidence for privacy regulations and audit frameworks.
• Manage schema changes as version-controlled code, delivered through CI/CD with migration testing, rollback plans and zero-downtime deployment patterns.
• Establish database development standards, review designs and code, and mentor developers.
• Maintain clear technical documentation for data models, procedures and operational runbooks.