Staff Database Administrator
Altruist · San Francisco, United States +1 · 17d ago
About Altruist
Altruist is transforming the multi-trillion dollar wealth management industry by building an AI platform for wealth professionals. We partner with financial advisors nationwide, empowering them to grow, optimize time and resources, and deliver superior outcomes for their clients.
We're looking for exceptional talent to help us achieve our mission of making financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to all. If you're passionate about challenging the status quo and want to do the most important work of your life, we'd love to meet you!
But first, our values
Kindness - Kindness doesn’t just equal niceness. We listen to understand. We embrace, and encourage healthy debate and diverse perspectives. We approach conflict openly, honestly, and respectfully.
Brilliance - Humility is the skill we’re most proud of and possessing a growth mindset is always top of mind. We take ownership in everything we touch; regularly using our unique superpowers to reach a common goal as a team. We succeed and fail as one.
Grit - When challenges arise, we stay laser focused on achieving our mission and finding a way forward, even when it’s hard. We are nimble and maintain a sense of urgency, swiftly adapting to change and overcoming obstacles.
This role follows a hybrid schedule, with three days per week onsite in our Culver City or San Francisco office.
The opportunity
Altruist is in the midst of an exceptional growth phase, and we are hiring a Staff Database Administrator to join our Cloud Infrastructure & Platform team. Our clearing and brokerage platform runs on a multi-terabyte Aurora PostgreSQL estate that is the system of record for hundreds of thousands of brokerage accounts, millions of positions, and hundreds of thousands of trades every day.
This role owns the reliability, performance, and resilience of that estate through its next order of magnitude. You will lead our multi-region disaster recovery program for data stores, break critical domains out of shared clusters into dedicated ones, and re-architect our replication and data movement layer so it keeps up as volumes multiply. You will be one of two staff-level database engineers, working directly with engineering leadership and partnering with platform, data, security, and product teams. The role carries a lot of autonomy for design and implementation, and real influence over where our data architecture goes next.
Your impact
- Own the production PostgreSQL estate end to end — multi-terabyte Aurora clusters across clearing, broker-dealer, and internal platform workloads — including capacity, performance, availability, and cost.
- Lead multi-region resilience for data stores: convert production clusters to Aurora Global Database, instrument replication lag against tiered RTO and RPO commitments, and own documented failover, failback, and recurring recovery drills.
- Drive database segmentation. Carve our most critical domains out of shared clusters into dedicated ones with their own read paths, so failover, upgrades, and blast radius are scoped per domain rather than per fleet.
- Architect for an order-of-magnitude increase in accounts, positions, and daily transaction volume: capacity modeling, tenant-aware partitioning and sharding strategy, per-domain read replicas, continuous aggregates and materialized views, connection pooling, and load testing ahead of demand.
- Own the upgrade program. Plan and execute major-version upgrades across the fleet with minimal downtime, and keep engine versions current enough that they never gate replication or recovery capability.
- Own change data capture and data movement — Debezium, Kafka/MSK, and AWS DMS — for throughput, lag, and correctness, including re-architecting single-threaded vendor replication paths into parallel, partitioned pipelines.
- Raise the bar on schema-change governance: review standards for migrations, index and locking review, and automated guardrails so unsafe changes are caught before they reach production rather than during market hours.
- Partner with security and compliance on encryption, row-level security, least-privilege access, and the evidence our SOC 1 and regulatory obligations depend on.
- Be a senior escalation point for database-driven incidents, and turn each one into a durable fix, a runbook, or an alert rather than a repeat.
- Build automation and AI-assisted tooling that makes routine database work self-serve for product engineers, and mentor engineers across the org on data modeling, query design, and operating databases at scale.
What you bring
- Experience - 8+ years operating production relational databases at scale, ideally at a B2B financial services, fintech, or SaaS organization handling regulated or transactional data.
- Deep PostgreSQL expertise: query planning and optimization, indexing, partitioning, vacuum and bloat management, locking and concurrency, replication, and connection management.
- Hands-on experience running Aurora or RDS at multi-terabyte scale, including major-version upgrades, blue/green cutovers, and parameter and storage tuning.
- Proven multi-region disaster recovery design: defining and defending RTO and RPO targets, cross-region replication, promotion and failback mechanics, and validated backup and restore.
- Practical experience with change data capture and data movement — Debezium, Kafka, or AWS DMS — and with diagnosing replication lag and correctness issues.
- Comfort working as code: Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, and version-controlled schema migration tooling such as Flyway or Liquibase.
- Strong observability instincts — you reach for pg_stat_statements, wait events, and dashboards before you reach for a guess.
- Education - Ideally a B.A. / B.S. in a relevant field such as Computer Science or a related discipline, but experience and understanding matter just as much.
- Staff-level scope - You set technical direction beyond your own work, lead multi-quarter programs across teams, and influence without needing authority to do it.
- Ownership - The pride you put into every aspect of your work is unparalleled and undeniable.
- Superb communication - Intentional dialogue is a superpower. You listen as well as you share your perspective with others.
- Resilience - We are inspired by your unwavering determination to achieve success, no matter the adversity you face along the way.
- Assurance - Your confidence is brilliant, yet ego-less. You possess a strong knowledge base, the ability to discover the unknown, and are open to differing perspectives.
- Creative problem solving - Identifying the problem is simply not enough. You are instinctually creative in your approach to finding solutions to roadblocks.
Bonus points
- Expertise with AI (Claude) best practices, and an interest in building agentic automation for database operations.
- Experience splitting a monolithic database into domain-owned clusters, or introducing sharding to a multi-tenant system already in production.
- MySQL, Snowflake, ElastiCache/Redis, or OpenSearch operational experience alongside PostgreSQL.
- Kafka or Amazon MSK operations, including connector fleets and upgrade planning.
- Experience supporting a large-scale data migration or platform integration, including historic data conversion into a canonical model.
- Familiarity with SOC 1, SOC 2, or similar audited control environments.
- Knowledge of brokerage, clearing, or custody platforms and the financial services industry.
What we bring
Attracting and retaining top-tier talent is a priority. We are proud of the culture we’ve built and are cognizant of the ever-changing professional landscape. Our dynamic offering of perks and benefits are tailored for you to feel your best while doing your best.
- Stunning, amenity-filled office spaces in Culver City, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Dallas, TX. Our offices are intentionally designed for comfort, collaboration, and productivity.
- Competitive total compensation.
- Premium healthcare, dental, and vision insurance plans (HMO and PPO).
- 401k savings plan with a 4% match and immediate vesting.
- 16 week paid parental leave after one year of employment.
- Professional growth and development opportunities including an employee mobility program and an annual L&D budget allocation for each employee.
- Company perks program (includes discounts on pet insurance, fitness, cell phone plans, and travel, etc.).
- Financial guidance program (includes counseling on navigating debt, tracking personal spend, saving and planning goals, home-purchasing preparedness, etc.).
- One month work from anywhere policy (with the exception of a few countries).
Total compensation includes a competitive benefits package, along with a bonus program for eligible roles. For salaried positions, a salary offer will be determined by a number of factors including experience, skill level, internal pay equity, geographic location, and other relevant business considerations. We review all employee pay and compensation programs regularly to ensure fair, equitable, and competitive pay. At Altruist, we are committed to providing fair, equitable, and competitive compensation by leveraging market data to inform our pay bands. Base salaries will be reviewed at regular intervals throughout the year, typically in conjunction with performance review cycles. By evaluating compensation on a regular basis, we are able to reward high performance and ensure all employees have opportunities for growth.
Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Altruist we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.