3 hours ago
Remote, Canada or Toronto, CanadaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Set the multi-year strategy and roadmap for PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, caching, streaming, and the broader datastore platform.
- Own production datastore reliability, availability, performance, cost, SLOs, error budgets, and operational standards.
- Design and deliver horizontally scaled, multi-tenant architectures supporting 10x growth, including partitioning, sharding, tenant isolation, and online rebalancing.
- Lead the migration to fully managed, highly available PostgreSQL with zero data loss and minimal downtime.
- Own ClickHouse architecture, schema design, ingestion, CDC pipelines, and analytical performance.
- Guide teams on datastore selection and data modeling for OLTP, OLAP, cache, and queue workloads.
- Build monitoring, alerting, load testing, capacity planning, replication, failover, backup, restore, and disaster recovery practices.
- Establish zero-downtime schema migration and continuous delivery practices.
- Review schemas and queries, write technical standards and design documents, mentor engineers, and support multiple engineering groups.
- Own data-layer security practices including encryption, access controls, secrets rotation, tenant isolation, and audit logging.
- Use AI tooling for migration planning, query optimization, runbook automation, and incident response.
- Participate in on-call, releases, CI/CD and infrastructure work, and lead major datastore incident response.
- Help define the hiring, onboarding, and operating model for the datastore engineering function.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or data platform engineering, including 5+ years owning production databases at scale in SaaS environments.
- Demonstrated Staff-level impact through cross-team technical direction and multi-quarter initiative leadership.
- Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge including internals, query optimization, indexing, partitioning, and replication.
- Hands-on experience with a columnar or OLAP datastore, ideally ClickHouse, including schema design, ingestion, and performance tuning.
- Experience designing and operating horizontally scaled, multi-tenant database architectures and replication topologies in production.
- Experience leading large-scale database migrations with zero data loss and minimal downtime.
- Deep experience with managed databases on AWS, including RDS, Aurora, and/or serverless PostgreSQL.
- Strong observability experience and ability to define and operate against SLOs.
- Platform engineering experience with infrastructure as code, connection pooling, schema migration tooling, and Python or Bash scripting.
- Deep hands-on fluency with AI coding agents and developer tools such as Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or Codex.
- Strong written and verbal communication, technical judgment, and cross-team consensus-building skills.
- Comfort working hands-on on a small infrastructure team with shared releases, on-call, and pipeline responsibilities.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
- Preferred: experience with Redis, Memcached, Kafka, Debezium, ClickPipes, MySQL/MariaDB, DynamoDB, internal data platforms, compliance frameworks, GitLab CI/CD, or open-source database projects.
Benefits
- Flexible remote or hybrid work arrangement within Canada.
- Clear Staff+ individual-contributor career path.
- Opportunity to found and lead Nue’s datastore function with company-wide scope and high ownership.
- Collaborative, supportive team that invests in employee growth.
- Opportunity to work on challenging infrastructure problems at a rapidly scaling revenue-lifecycle SaaS company.
Tech Stack
Amazon DynamoDBApache KafkaAWSBashClickHouseDatadogFlywayGitLab CI/CDGoogle BigQueryMariaDBMySQLPostgreSQLPythonRedisSnowflakeTerraform
About Gem
Gem builds an AI-driven recruiting platform that unifies ATS, CRM, sourcing, scheduling, and analytics for talent acquisition teams, with access to a large candidate profile database. It sells its software as a SaaS solution that integrates with customers’ hiring stacks. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco, the privately held company serves organizations ranging from startups to enterprises, including customers like Zillow, DoorDash, and Asana.