Database Engineer

Database Engineer (Remote)

Ruby Labs is a leading tech company creating innovative consumer products across health, education, and entertainment. We are building a high-scale payment orchestration system processing millions of financial transactions monthly. Our platform operates at the critical intersection of payments, billing, subscriptions, analytics, and CRM tooling, where data correctness, performance, and reliability are paramount. As we experience rapid growth, our database layer is a key component of our success.

We are seeking a Senior Database Engineer to own, scale, and evolve our data infrastructure, ensuring it remains fast, reliable, and prepared for future growth. You will join a talented, fully remote engineering team that values ownership, technical excellence, and pragmatic decision-making.

About the Role

As a Database Engineer at Ruby Labs, you will be responsible for designing, operating, and optimizing databases within a high-volume payments environment. This role involves working with large datasets, complex queries, performance bottlenecks, large-scale migrations, and analytics pipelines. You will collaborate closely with backend engineers and product teams to ensure our data layer effectively 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).
  • Implement and maintain advanced indexing (B-Tree, GIN, partial indexes).
  • Perform query optimization and execution-plan tuning.
  • Manage 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, and 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, balancing flexibility, correctness, and performance at scale.
• Analytics & Logging:
  • Work with event and log data pipelines, including Tinybird/ClickHouse-based analytics.
  • Determine appropriate data placement for transactional 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 key 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.
  • Contribute to backup, replication, and disaster-recovery strategies.

Requirements

• Strong hands-on experience with PostgreSQL in a production environment.
• Experience managing large databases (hundreds of millions of rows or more).
• Solid understanding of indexing strategies, query planners, execution paths, transactions, isolation levels, and locking.
• Experience working with AWS-based infrastructure, specifically AWS Aurora.
• Ability to independently investigate and resolve complex performance issues.

Strong Plus

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

Location

Ruby Labs operates within the CET (Central European Time) zone. Applicants from any country are welcome to apply as long as they are located within approximately ± 4 hours of CET to ensure optimal collaboration during working hours.

What We Offer

• Remote Work Environment: Enjoy the flexibility and work-life balance of working from anywhere.
• Unlimited PTO: Take the time off you need to recharge, without counting days.
• Paid National Holidays: Relax and celebrate national holidays with paid time off.
• Company-provided MacBook: Receive a top-notch Apple MacBook to support your productivity.
• Flexible Independent Contractor Agreement: Benefit from autonomy, tax advantages, and the freedom to work from anywhere.

Interview Process

Our application review typically takes 3 to 5 days. If there's a potential fit, the process includes:

• Recruiter Screening (40 minutes)
• Technical Interview (60 minutes)
• Final Interview