[Hiring] Senior Database Engineer @Ruby Labs

Role Description

We are building a high-scale payment orchestration system that processes millions of financial transactions every month across multiple payment providers, regions, and products. Our platform operates at the intersection of payments, billing, subscriptions, analytics, and internal CRM tooling, where data correctness, performance, and reliability are mission-critical. As our transaction volume and customer base continue to grow rapidly, our database layer has become one of the most important parts of the system.

We are looking for a strong Database Engineer who will own, scale, and evolve our data infrastructure, ensuring it remains fast, reliable, and ready for long-term growth. You will be joining a high-talent, fully remote engineering organization with strong backend, infrastructure, and product teams. We value ownership, technical excellence, and pragmatic decision-making. Engineers at RubyLabs work on real scale, real money, and real impact.

As a Database Engineer at RubyLabs, you will be responsible for designing, operating, and optimizing databases in a high-volume payments environment. This role goes far beyond basic CRUD operations — you will work with large datasets, complex queries, performance bottlenecks, migrations on massive tables, and analytics pipelines. You will collaborate closely with backend engineers and product teams to ensure our data layer supports both transactional workloads and analytical use cases, including internal CRM search and observability.

Key Responsibilities

• Database Ownership & Scalability
  • Own and operate AWS Aurora (PostgreSQL) in a high-load production environment
  • Design and evolve schemas for large transactional domains (payments, customers, subscriptions, events)
  • Implement and maintain:
    • Table partitioning strategies (time-based, tenant-based, hybrid)
    • Advanced indexing (B-Tree, GIN, partial indexes)
    • Query optimization and execution-plan tuning
  • Handle databases with millions of new records per month while maintaining predictable performance
• Performance Optimization
  • Analyze and optimize slow queries and production metrics
  • Identify and resolve:
    • Lock contention
    • Vacuum / autovacuum issues
    • Connection pool saturation
    • Long-running or inefficient queries
  • Proactively prevent performance regressions as data volume grows
• Search & Internal Tools
  • Design high-performance search solutions for large operational datasets used in internal CRM tools
  • Implement efficient search strategies
  • Balance flexibility, correctness, and performance at scale
• Analytics & Logging
  • Work with event and log data pipelines, including Tinybird / ClickHouse-based analytics
  • Decide which data belongs in transactional databases vs analytical stores
  • Enable fast, real-time insights for product, finance, and operations teams
• Reliability & Operations
  • Ensure data integrity and consistency in financial workflows
  • Define and monitor database health metrics (latency, replication lag, storage, IOPS)
  • Plan and execute safe schema changes and migrations on large tables
  • Participate in incident analysis related to data performance or availability
  • Work in backups, replication, and disaster-recovery strategies

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on experience with PostgreSQL in production
• Experience managing large databases (hundreds of millions of rows or more)
• Solid understanding of:
  • Indexing strategies
  • Query planners and execution paths
  • Transactions, isolation levels, and locking
• Experience working with AWS-based infrastructure, ideally AWS Aurora
• Ability to independently investigate and resolve complex performance issues

Requirements

• Experience in payments, billing, fintech, or financial systems (Strong Plus)
• Familiarity with analytical databases (ClickHouse, Tinybird, or similar) (Strong Plus)
• Familiarity with OpenSearch or similar, including data ingestion from PostgreSQL (Strong Plus)
• Experience designing data models for multi-tenant systems (Strong Plus)
• Understanding of event-driven architectures and data pipelines (Strong Plus)
• AWS certifications (e.g., Solutions Architect, Database Specialty) (Strong Plus)

Benefits

• Remote Work Environment: Embrace the freedom to work from anywhere, anytime, promoting a healthy work-life balance.
• Unlimited PTO: Enjoy unlimited paid time off to recharge and prioritize your well-being, without counting days.
• Paid National Holidays: Celebrate and relax on national holidays with paid time off to unwind and recharge.
• Company-provided MacBook: Experience seamless productivity with top-notch Apple MacBooks provided to all employees who need them.
• Flexible Independent Contractor Agreement: Unlock the benefits of flexibility, autonomy, and entrepreneurial opportunities. Benefit from tax advantages, networking opportunities, reduced employment obligations, and the freedom to work from anywhere.