We are exclusively partnered to find this person for our client who is a high-growth video platform and cloud services provider that is creating an independent infrastructure. The mission is to restore the internet to its roots by making it free and open once again.

About the Role:

Our partner is seeking a Principal Database Architect to own the architecture, technical direction, and successful delivery of their Database as a Service (DBaaS) offering within their public cloud platform. This role will take over a product already in active development and guide it through hardening, integration, launch, and global scale-out. You will be responsible for shaping the long-term technical roadmap of the service, ensuring it is secure, reliable, performant, and operable at scale for customers worldwide. You will work closely with the development team, engineering team, and early adopter customers to refine the design, drive high-quality implementation, and build the patterns and practices that future engineers will follow.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the end-to-end architecture of the DBaaS product, including multitenancy, high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore, observability, and security.
• Review and influence existing epics, stories, and technical designs, identifying gaps and driving improvements.
• Define and maintain architectural standards and patterns for databases across their public cloud (provisioning, configuration, lifecycle management, monitoring, security).
• Work closely with platform, networking, and security teams to integrate DBaaS into their cloud infrastructure, including identity, networking, billing, self-service, and automation.
• Collaborate with Product Management to align technical roadmap with product vision, SLAs/SLOs, and customer requirements.
• Serve as the highest-level technical escalation point for DBaaS-related issues in development, staging, and production environments.
• Support onboarding and success of early “friendly” customers: assist with deployments, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and architecture guidance.
• Define and evolve operational runbooks, incident response patterns, and SRE practices for the DBaaS platform.
• Mentor and coach other engineers and architects as they build an internal team around the service, raising the overall bar for database and data platform expertise.
• Establish and enforce security, compliance, and data protection best practices for the DBaaS offering (encryption, access control, auditing, regulatory considerations).
• Participate in capacity planning and cost optimization, ensuring the service is economically viable at scale.
• Conduct periodic architecture reviews and post-incident reviews, driving continuous improvement in reliability and customer experience.
• Support and advise internal teams on the operation, performance, and troubleshooting of existing database clusters, in addition to primary ownership of the DBaaS platform.

Required Skills & Experience:

• Expert-level experience in database engineering, data platforms, or infrastructure, with significant ownership of production database systems or services.
• Deep expertise with at least one major relational database engine (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, or similar), including replication, backup/restore, performance tuning, and operational best practices.
• Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure concepts, including compute, networking, storage, and security in public cloud or large private cloud environments.
• Experience integrating databases or DBaaS-like offerings with cloud control planes, APIs, and automation/orchestration systems.
• Strong background in reliability engineering for data services (monitoring, alerting, SLOs, incident management, capacity planning).
• Familiarity with security and compliance requirements for database services (encryption at rest/in transit, access control, auditing, data retention, regulatory considerations).
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code and automation tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, or similar) and comfort working with CI/CD pipelines.
• Scripting or programming skills (e.g., Python, Go, Bash or similar) for automation, tooling, and integration.
• Proven track record of technical leadership: influencing designs across teams, mentoring engineers, and making clear trade-off decisions.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with external vendors, internal stakeholders, and customers.

Nice to Have (Preferred Skills):

• Strong, hands-on expertise with both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
• Experience designing or operating multi-tenant, high-availability, and distributed database architectures in a cloud or large-scale environment.
• Experience designing or operating a DBaaS offering (e.g., Amazon RDS/Aurora, Azure Database, Cloud SQL, or similar managed services).
• Knowledge of NoSQL or specialized data stores (e.g., Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra) and when to apply them.
• Experience in Kubernetes-based data workloads, operators, or stateful services.
• Familiarity with multi-region architectures, data residency, and geo-replication patterns.
• Exposure to observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, OpenTelemetry) for data services.
• Relevant certifications in databases, cloud architecture, or security are a plus.

Qualifications:

• Demonstrated success owning the architecture and technical direction of a mission-critical platform or service.
• Strong customer empathy and a track record of working directly with users or customers to solve complex technical problems.
• Ability to operate at both strategic and hands-on levels, from roadmap and design reviews down to debugging complex production issues.

Annual Compensation Range: 

• $185,000 - $265,000 USD base + benefits + equity (If based in the United States)

Note: The salary range listed for this position is a good faith estimate based on experience, qualifications, and internal compensation structure. The actual salary offered varies depending on the candidate's skill level and experience. This posting refers to an active vacancy within the organization.

Why The Team Loves Working Here:

• Making a significant financial impact for their video creator community; proud of their success stories
• Enjoy challenging the status quo and going head-to-head against Big Tech
• Are note afraid to try new things; act fast and want to win
• Pay competitive salaries and provide great benefits