Database Platform Distinguished Engineer

Dayforce is a global human capital management (HCM) company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, with operations across North America, Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA), and the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region. Our award-winning Cloud HCM platform offers a unified solution database and continuous calculation engine, driving efficiency, productivity and compliance for the global workforce. Our brand promise – Makes Work Life Better – reflects our commitment to employees, customers, partners and communities globally.

We are redefining the data foundation that powers Dayforce. As a Distinguished Database Platform Engineer, you will set the technical direction for how we design, scale, and operate our data platforms—spanning transactional systems and modern lakehouse architectures. This is a hands-on architectural role for a technical leader who thrives on solving complex data challenges, influencing engineering at scale, and modernizing data platform engineering through cloud, automation, and AI.

• Define and drive the architecture of highly scalable, resilient data platforms across OLTP and analytical systems
• Lead the evolution of Lakehouse architecture, supporting unified data and analytics
• Own performance, reliability, and scalability across critical database platforms through deep, hands-on expertise
• Guide adoption of modern platforms and tooling (e.g., Databricks, cloud-native services, automation frameworks)
• Partner with engineering and data teams to shape data models, access patterns, and platform capabilities
• Influence technical strategy and raise engineering standards across the organization
• Lead hands-on investigation and resolution of complex customer database and data lake performance, reliability, and data consistency issues, including direct analysis of production systems when needed

• Expert-level experience with large-scale database platforms (e.g., SQL Server, PostgreSQL) in production environments
• Strong background in modern data architecture and distributed data systems
• Experience with Databricks and cloud data platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Familiarity with both relational and No
  
  SQL systems (e.g., MongoDB)
• Deep expertise in performance tuning, scalability, and high-availability design
• Proven ability to operate as a technical leader—setting direction while remaining hands-on
• Comfort leveraging AI and automation to improve database platform operations and engineering productivity
• 10+ years of experience designing, operating, and optimizing large-scale production database platforms
• Deep hands-on expertise with enterprise relational database technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL
• Strong experience with distributed data systems and modern data architectures, including Data Lake, Delta Lake, or Lakehouse platforms
• Experience troubleshooting complex database performance, scalability, reliability, and data consistency issues in production environments
• Experience with cloud platforms and cloud-native data services (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Strong understanding of high availability, disaster recovery, backup/recovery, indexing, query optimization, performance tuning, Change Data Capture, and Event Driven systems
• Experience working with automation, observability, and infrastructure-as-code approaches for platform operations
• Proven ability to influence technical direction and collaborate effectively across engineering, infrastructure, and data teams
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

• Experience with Databricks and modern Lakehouse implementations supporting unified analytics and operational workloads
• Experience with No
  
  SQL technologies such as MongoDB or other distributed document/key-value databases
• Experience designing and operating platforms that support both transactional and analytical workloads at enterprise scale
• Experience modernizing legacy database environments into cloud-native or hybrid architectures
• Demonstrated technical leadership in architecting shared platform capabilities,…