spreedly - Senior Database Engineer
Requirements
• 5+ years of experience in a role where operating and optimizing production databases was your primary job, not a side responsibility of application development. • Deep, hands-on experience managing distributed databases, including their performance and high-availability behavior. • Hands-on experience managing relational databases supporting business-critical production systems. • A track record of diagnosing database inefficiencies and delivering measurable improvements to queries, indexing, schema, or configuration. • Strong SQL skills and fluency with execution plans, transaction management, and the trade-offs of distributed SQL (replication, consistency, consensus, distributed transactions). • The ability to assess the risk of a database change and explain technical trade-offs clearly to other engineers. • An independent approach to investigating unfamiliar systems, identifying priorities, and carrying improvements through to completion. • A considerate, collaborative working style with teams whose work depends on yours, and whose expertise you depend on. • Production experience administering CockroachDB at meaningful transaction volumes, including diagnosing contention, transaction retries, and hot ranges. • Experience operating a managed database service and working effectively with the vendor's support and engineering teams. • Experience with zero- or minimal-downtime schema migrations on large, high-traffic tables. • Experience supporting payments, financial technology, or similarly availability-sensitive platforms. • Experience with database capacity planning and cluster sizing, including multi-region topologies. • Experience building operational tooling or checks in Python, Go, or similar languages. • Familiarity with how ORMs (for example, Rails ActiveRecord) shape database access patterns. • Cloud experience on AWS or Azure; database-focused cloud certifications are a plus. • Neither CockroachDB nor PostgreSQL experience is a prerequisite if you bring the depth of distributed database management experience this role needs.
Responsibilities
• Improve database performance • Investigate our current database setup to find performance bottlenecks and reliability risks, using instrumentation, code review, and staging tests where appropriate. • Find and improve slow-running queries, identify missing or inefficient indexes, and evaluate database settings against what the application actually needs. • Diagnose distributed-database issues such as transaction contention and retries, hot ranges, and inefficient access patterns, and partner with application engineers to fix them at the source. • Establish performance baselines so meaningful changes in workload behavior are visible early. • Be the database subject-matter expert • Help engineering teams understand the risks and trade-offs of significant changes before they reach production, including schema migrations, new access patterns, and configuration changes. • Participate in design reviews for systems that place significant demands on the database, and give clear guidance on schema design, primary key selection, indexing, and transaction boundaries. • Contribute database expertise to incident response and root-cause analysis, and turn what we learn into lasting fixes. • Own database practices • Develop safer migration procedures, documentation, and guidance so application teams can evolve data models without needing you involved in every step. • Take ongoing ownership of operational practices, including planning version upgrades, validating backup and recovery against our availability objectives, and keeping cluster settings and sizing right for our workload. • Improve database observability so the signals that matter (latency, retries, contention, range health, capacity) are visible and actionable alongside our broader production monitoring. • Work with Cockroach Labs as a knowledgeable counterpart on our managed environment, and help us right-size our database footprint as we grow. • Partner across engineering • Work closely with infrastructure, platform, and application engineers to improve database performance and availability. • Mentor engineers on database troubleshooting, performance, and distributed-database concepts.
Benefits
• Outstanding Medical and Dental benefits, including 100% employer-paid option • Company-paid Life and Disability insurance • Optional vision and supplemental insurance options, and various Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) • Open Paid Time Off policy + 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents • Matching 401(k) plan (5% up to $5,000 yearly) • $1,000 annual professional development stipend • Monthly home working/digital lifestyle stipend, new MacBook, and one-time accessory reimbursement • Access to company-paid professional coaching service • Visits to HQ in Durham, North Carolina for remote employees • Spreedly Product Offering: • Spreedly provides an open payments platform. The platform’s connectivity provides payments performance. Key products and services include: • Connect — A unified API that integrates with hundreds of payment gateways, processors, and alternative payment methods worldwide, including digital wallets. Merchants access the global payments ecosystem through one connection. • Vault — A PCI-compliant secure repository for payment methods. Merchants store card data once and reuse it across any payment service, reducing PCI scope and protecting cardholder data at scale. • Optimize — Workflow-driven routing and retry logic that directs each transaction to the best-performing gateway in real time. On average, 7.9% of failed transactions succeed immediately when retried on a secondary gateway. This is where merchants recover lost revenue and increase authorization success rates. • Protect — A flexible fraud and authentication layer, incorporating advanced fraud tools and 3DS. Following Spreedly's acquisition of Dodgeball in September 2025, fraud orchestration and payment optimization now operate within the same platform. • Resolve — Centralized management and reporting that reduces operational silos, strengthens security, and improves billing control across a merchant's entire payment operation. • More Coming Soon! - Keep your eyes peeled for a new product launch by EOY '26 • What It's Like to Work Here: • We describe our team as "Spreedlings": diverse, forward-thinking, and driven by a shared belief that a more open payments ecosystem benefits everyone. The company operates with a culture built on transparency, courageous collaboration, and self-driven leadership. The team values simplicity in both product and process, and approaches problem-solving with genuine curiosity. • We champion the ethical, creative use of AI—if you’re someone who pairs human judgment with modern AI tools to work smarter and drive bigger impact, you’ll thrive here.
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