Senior Database Engineer

Why This Role Matters The Senior Database Engineer at […] owns the data systems that move and protect information behind national security decisions — the schemas, pipelines, and datastores our enterprise platform runs on. This is not a ticket-closing seat. You are the go-to engineer for a data domain: you design the schemas, tune the queries that are actually slow, keep the pipelines healthy, and lead the medium-sized data work from requirements through production.

You operate independently, call out risk before it becomes an outage, and set the bar for the engineers around you. What You Own Own sets of tables, schemas, and data flows end-to-end within a larger product or program — including their data quality, performance, and operability over time. Design robust relational schemas and data models with sound normalization and denormalization tradeoffs, DDL, and extensive SQL.

Work across SQL and NoSQL datastores (MongoDB, Postgres/RDS, Amazon Athena) following best practices, and represent practical DB constraints in data modeling discussions. Lead the design and delivery of medium-sized data features — new domains, new ingest, or significant schema changes. Build moderately complex ETL/ingest pipelines with incremental loads, error handling, and validation.

Investigate and fix non-trivial performance problems — bad query plans, missing indexes, partitioning, table bloat — and tune queries, indexes, and configurations for real workloads. Apply database-level security c