Principal Database Engineer

Position: Staff/Principal Database Engineer
# Staff/Principal Database Engineer With our career opportunities we offer competitive compensation and a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical, dental, wellness program, paid parental leave, professional development, and a fully stocked kitchen.

Everlaw is looking for a
** Staff or Principal Database Engineer
** to serve as the technical cornerstone of our data infrastructure. As a mid-sized SaaS company experiencing rapid growth, our challenge isn't just storing data—it's ensuring that data is highly available, performant at scale, and ready to power the next generation of AI-driven  this role, you will be the in-house expert for our databases and storage layer, moving fluidly between low-level optimizations and high-level architectural design.

You will have the autonomy to make high-stakes decisions and the resources to implement the latest advancements in data infrastructure. You will help to drive the work of a core squad of engineers, as well as provide technical guidance to engineers to level up their database expertise across the broader engineering organization. You’ll also collaborate with (and learn from) a community of other staff and principal engineers with industry-leading expertise in search, cloud infrastructure, full stack SaaS application design, data science, and performance.

You’ll have regular visibility to, and interactions with, our Chief Technology Officer and other senior leaders at the company.
*
* Note:

** We value "applied" expertise. We are looking for someone who loves the theory but lives for the practice of keeping production systems running smoothly.

This is a full-time, exempt position located onsite (3 days/week in office) in Oakland, California.### Getting started
* ** We want you to feel like part of the team early on!
** Our onboarding process will integrate you into the company with informative sessions on our product, policies, processes, and team structure and goals.
* ** We’re excited for you to learn, grow, and contribute right away!
** We trust that you’ll bring industry experience and knowledge that will uplift and uplevel the team, but we don’t expect you to know everything on Day 1.### In your role, you'll...
* ** Design Everlaw’s database and storage strategy:
** Direct how our primary transactional databases interface with our coding architecture, caching layers, and analytics data store.
* ** Design for scalability, sharding, and replication:
** Lead the strategy for horizontal scaling, including logical partitioning and sharding, to support our growing SaaS environment. You’ll own the design of multi-region replication strategies and failover mechanisms to ensure high availability. You’ll build systems to monitor and mitigate replication lag and data consistency.
* ** Dive deep into database performance tuning:
** Analyze and optimize database internals, including memory management, disk I/O, and query execution plans.
* ** Plan for low-downtime migrations**:
Lead the design and execution of database migration strategies for SQL environments to ensure high availability and minimal business interruption.
* ** Put observability front and center in our approach:
** Build and maintain tooling to provide visibility into database health and bottleneck identification before they impact customers.
* ** Always be learning:
** Stay at the forefront of the industry, evaluating when to adopt emerging technologies versus optimizing our existing stack. You’ll bring back your learnings to the team and how you might apply these to our work.### About you
* You have
** at least 10 years of experience
** in software engineering, with at least 6 years of experience in database engineering.
* You have a
** deep understanding of the storage engines and locking mechanisms
** of at least one major RDBMS (Postgres or MySQL preferred).
* You have
** experience with Distributed Systems:
** Proven track record of managing databases in a cloud environment (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
* You have a record of
** Leadership.
** You have demonstrated you can
** mentor senior engineers
** and influence the broader engineering organization’s data culture.### Pluses
* You have
** practical…