Staff Engineer - Platform (Database & Data Infrastructure)

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Engineer - Platform (Database & Data Infrastructure) based in India.** This is a high-impact senior individual contributor role focused on shaping database and data infrastructure strategy at company scale. You will design systems capable of supporting significant growth in data volume, traffic, and engineering demand. The role spans database architecture, distributed systems, reliability, scalability, observability, and infrastructure economics. You will work across multiple engineering teams to establish scalable patterns, technical standards, and self-service platform capabilities. You will lead complex initiatives such as migrations, sharding, re-platforming, multi-region architectures, and major performance improvements. Success will come from the lasting technical leverage, reliability, efficiency, and developer experience improvements you create across the organization. This opportunity is ideal for an experienced infrastructure engineer who combines deep technical expertise with strong architectural judgment and company-wide influence. ### Accountabilities - Define and continuously evolve the long-term database and data infrastructure strategy, aligning architecture with anticipated business and engineering growth. - Design database architectures capable of supporting the next order of magnitude in data volume, traffic, and operational complexity. - Establish architectural standards and scalable engineering patterns covering database selection, data modeling, partitioning, sharding, replication, consistency, availability, and data lifecycle management. - Lead complex, cross-functional initiatives including database migrations, re-platforming, sharding, multi-region architectures, and large-scale scalability improvements. - Identify systemic reliability, scalability, capacity, and performance risks proactively and drive solutions before they become critical production issues. - Develop database platform capabilities that make infrastructure increasingly self-service, observable, reliable, efficient, and easier for engineering teams to operate. - Establish strategies for capacity planning, data growth, archival, disaster recovery, resilience, and infrastructure efficiency. - Identify opportunities to improve database performance and materially reduce infrastructure costs at organizational scale. - Evaluate emerging database technologies and architectures, making pragmatic technology-selection and build-versus-buy recommendations. - Partner with senior engineers and engineering leadership to influence architecture, technical strategy, and long-term platform direction. - Mentor engineers and raise the technical standard for database and distributed-systems engineering across the organization. - Create reusable technical standards and platform approaches that enable engineering teams to scale effectively as the organization grows. ## Requirements - Significant experience operating as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or equivalent senior individual contributor, with responsibility for solving infrastructure or database challenges across multiple engineering teams. - Deep understanding of database internals and distributed systems, including storage, indexing, partitioning, sharding, replication, consistency, transactions, availability, and failure modes. - Proven experience designing and operating production database environments with multi-terabyte or larger datasets. - Experience with high-throughput production systems handling approximately 30K–50K+ operations per second, with experience at substantially higher scale being advantageous. - Strong production experience across multiple database technologies and architectures, including relational databases as well as NoSQL and distributed systems. - Demonstrated experience leading major architectural changes, migrations, modernization programs, or scalability initiatives involving multiple engineering teams. - Strong understanding of database reliability, capacity planning, observability, performance optimization, and infrastructure economics. - Ability to take ambiguous and complex technical problems, establish a clear direction, build organizational alignment, and drive initiatives through execution. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence engineers and senior technical leaders without relying on formal authority. - Programming experience in one or more languages such as Node.js, Java, or Python. - Relevant experience with database and data technologies such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Aurora, Spanner, CockroachDB, TiDB, YugabyteDB, Vitess, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra, ScyllaDB, HBase, Cosmos DB, Couchbase, or Firestore is valuable. - Experience with search and high-throughput systems such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Redis/Valkey, or comparable technologies is advantageous. - Exposure to large-scale analytical platforms such as ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, Pinot, or Druid is a plus. - Strong architectural fundamentals are more important than experience with any specific technology stack; the ability to reason about trade-offs across different database technologies is essential. - A strong combination of deep database expertise, distributed-systems thinking, architectural judgment, execution capability, and company-wide technical influence. ## Benefits - Remote, full-time opportunity based in India. - Senior individual contributor position with company-wide technical scope and influence. - Opportunity to shape database and data infrastructure strategy for large-scale, high-throughput systems. - Ability to work across multiple engineering teams and influence long-term architecture and technology decisions. - Exposure to complex challenges involving distributed databases, scalability, reliability, observability, and infrastructure economics. - Opportunity to lead high-impact initiatives such as database migrations, sharding, re-platforming, and multi-region architecture. - Significant autonomy to establish technical standards and build scalable infrastructure patterns. - Strong opportunities for technical mentorship and organizational impact without requiring people-management responsibilities. - Opportunity to work with a broad range of modern relational, NoSQL, distributed, analytical, and high-throughput technologies. - Remote-first environment designed to support global collaboration, ownership, and flexibility.