[Hiring] Senior PostgreSQL Database Reliability Engineer @Nodal Exchange

Role Description

Senior Postgres Database Reliability Engineer

Tysons Corner, VA (DC Metro Area) - will consider remote hiring from select states.

Every trade on one of North America’s largest power futures exchanges runs through PostgreSQL. Every settlement, every margin calculation, every risk assessment. This isn’t a database that supports the business—it is the business.

We’re hiring a Database Reliability Engineer who can own our data layer end to end. Not someone who monitors dashboards and runs backups—someone who understands WAL internals, thinks in replication topologies, and has opinions about how data infrastructure should evolve.

You’ll work inside a small, high-impact IT organization at a CFTC-regulated commodities exchange and clearing house. The systems you build and operate directly underpin billions of dollars in traded contracts.

Key Responsibilities

• Production PostgreSQL infrastructure across the full lifecycle: architecture, deployment, replication, monitoring, performance tuning, backup/recovery, and capacity planning.
• Streaming replication and high-availability configurations that meet the uptime expectations of a regulated financial exchange.
• Query and system-level performance analysis—diagnosing slow queries, optimizing execution plans, tuning shared_buffers, work_mem, and autovacuum.
• Backup and disaster recovery strategy using tools like Barman, including point-in-time recovery testing and validation.
• Data architecture evolution: modernizing data warehouse and reporting infrastructure, building ETL pipelines, and designing data flows that scale with the business.
• Data services across the organization: test data management, data obfuscation, data modeling, and supporting data needs for development, QA, and business teams.
• Operational support including on-call rotation for after-hours production database emergencies.

Qualifications

• 5+ years hands-on PostgreSQL administration in production environments—not just dev/test, not just managed RDS.
• Deep understanding of PostgreSQL internals: WAL mechanics, MVCC, vacuum processing, the query planner and optimizer, connection handling, and lock management.
• Proven experience with physical and logical replication: setup, monitoring, failover, and troubleshooting split-brain scenarios.
• Strong SQL performance tuning skills: reading EXPLAIN ANALYZE output, identifying indexing strategies, understanding join algorithms, and resolving locking contention.
• Solid Linux systems administration (we run Ubuntu)—comfortable with systemd, filesystem performance, memory management, and networking fundamentals.
• Experience with backup/recovery tools (Barman, pgBackRest, or equivalent) and tested disaster recovery procedures.
• Experience building and maintaining ETL pipelines and data transformation processes.
• Ability to work autonomously in a small team where you’re expected to own problems from identification through resolution.
• Strong communication skills—you can explain a replication topology to a developer or a data availability timeline to a business stakeholder.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or a related field.

Highly Valued

• Experience operating databases in regulated or financial services environments where uptime and audit trails are non-negotiable.
• Hands-on AWS experience (EC2, RDS, S3, networking)—we run a hybrid on-prem/cloud infrastructure.
• Infrastructure-as-code skills: Ansible and/or Terraform for automated, repeatable database deployments.
• Python scripting for automation, tooling, and data pipeline development.
• Experience with data obfuscation and masking techniques for non-production environments.
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, pgWatch, or similar).
• Experience with cloud migration—moving database workloads from on-premises to AWS.
• Contributions to PostgreSQL community, conference talks, or published writing on database engineering topics.

Why This Role

• Your work directly supports a critical piece of U.S. energy market infrastructure—this isn’t a CRUD app backing a SaaS product.
• Small team, large scope: you’ll have real ownership and architectural influence, not just ticket duty.
• In-house platforms mean you work directly with the engineers who build the systems your databases serve.
• Part of the Deutsche Börse Group—global exchange operator with institutional stability.
• A leadership team that understands database engineering at a technical level and will invest in doing things right.

Compensation

Salary Range: $170,000 - $210,000 per year base salary, when annualized.

Pay Transparency Notice: The salary range is based on the D.C. metro area. The successful candidate’s starting salary will vary depending on permissible, non-discriminatory factors including but not limited to qualifications, skills, and experience. Nodal also offers a wide range of benefits and perks for full-time employees, which may include target bonuses.

Benefits

Nodal Employee Benefits and Perks: https://nodalexchange.pinpointhq.com