Database Engineer

We’re making payments the most powerful tool in commerce — come build with us.

Most database engineering job descriptions read like a checklist of maintenance tasks, migrations, and optimization tickets. This one is different. At pmtbox ("Payment Box"), we’re building a fintech platform that manages payments-related risk, fraud, chargebacks, card declines, and related operational workflows for retail clients. We’re a VC-backed fintech with a small team, over 1,000 active clients, and big ambitions, and we’re looking for engineers who want to build systems, not just maintain them.

We’re looking for a Database Engineer who wants to help design scale, and tune the data foundation behind a rapidly growing fintech platform.

If you’ve spent your career in environments where database work is isolated to ticket queues and reactive support work … this role might feel very different. We’re looking for engineers who:

• Think deeply about data architecture, scalability, and operational reliability
• Enjoy solving complex systems and data workflow problems
• Build infrastructure and tooling proactively rather than reactively
• Care about performance, integrity, observability, and long-term maintainability
• Use AI as a force multiplier in their engineering workflow
• Think beyond queries and into the operational systems powered by data

You’ll be building real systems alongside founders, including a technical co-founder with deep industry experience and expertise, and a small, high-performing engineering team. Expect to:

• Design and optimize scalable relational database architecture across a growing fintech platform
• Improve database performance, indexing strategies, query optimization, and operational reliability
• Help architect and evolve complex data models tied to payments, fraud, risk, operational workflows, and reporting systems
• Build tooling around data validation, migrations, observability, integrity checks, and operational monitoring
• Improve reporting, analytics, and internal operational data workflows
• Partner closely with backend and frontend engineers to improve system performance and scalability
• Contribute to architectural decisions around data storage, caching, replication, and long-term scalability
• Use and refine AI-assisted development and operational workflows
• Improve database testing, CI/CD processes, and deployment reliability

This is not a role where everything is already defined, but it’s also not greenfield. You’ll be building within established systems and patterns while helping evolve them over time. Our engineering team is intentionally small and high-ownership. We currently support over 1,000 active clients across a Rails/Postgres/Redis stack with AI-assisted development workflows integrated into daily work. We maintain a tests-first culture, CI pipelines, structured project context, and operational guardrails that allow engineers to move quickly without sacrificing quality or reliability.

This isn’t a “move fast and break things” environment. It’s a “move fast because the guardrails are good” kind of environment. You’ll have real autonomy within well-defined boundaries: clear architectural patterns, collaborative decision-making, tested systems, and documentation that allows you to ship independently without constant oversight.

We care less about years of experience and more about how you think, design systems, and solve operational problems. You might be a great fit if you:

• Have strong experience working with relational databases such as Postgres, MySQL, or similar systems, as well as Redis
• Understand indexing, query optimization, schema design, migrations, and database scalability concepts deeply
• Have experience supporting production systems with meaningful operational complexity
• Think beyond individual queries and into systems, workflows, maintainability, and reliability
• Can build tooling, automation, or operational improvements proactively
• Can show things you’ve built yourself: database tooling, performance optimization work, automation scripts, side projects, Git Hub projects, or internal infrastructure work
• Are curious about how AI changes…