Database Engineer / Solutions Architect - (Cape Town) at WebFX

What You'll Do

Our database engineer is 70% database expert & 30% software engineer.

You will spend the majority of your time making application changes to improve database performance, scalability and reliability and delivering foundational database solutions and best practices for our backend development teams.

During our call, we can show you a demo of our amazing proprietary platform!

Responsibilities

• Pro-actively identify database performance impediments and resolve them by proposing and delivering changes to the codebase. Own this process end-to-end, from triaging issues to verifying your solution in production
• Deliver application changes that allow us to scale the application and its database further and make sure we're prepared for data growth
• Act as a Database Maintainer for the codebase and review database-related application changes before they are released
• Review, optimize and refactor the existing database schema
• Create and incrementally improve documentation to reduce tribal knowledge, including
• Database best practices
• Workflows and database team processes
• Target architecture and long term scalability considerations
• Improve tooling to detect performance bottlenecks early in the development cycle
• Work with the Google Cloud Platform (Our platform is on GCP)
• Identify problematic database patterns by analyzing workload and implementing/suggesting solutions
• Implement a partitioning strategy framework for large tables
• Implement building blocks to efficiently load, analyze and migrate data
• Analyze tables and optimizing them by adding indexes, breaking them up into separate tables, or by removing unnecessary columns
• Implement an efficient queueing strategy for pull mirrors
• Implement efficient patterns for counting
• Rewrite the database queries and related application logic used for retrieving subgroups
• Prevent primary key integer overflows with no-downtime migrations
• Improve index usage (remove unused, identify missing)
• Improve our application-side database load balancing implementation
• Review database related changes submitted by other developers
• Document database best practices or patterns to avoid

Who We're Looking For

• Expert-level understanding of relational databases, SQL and query optimization techniques and demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent performance problems
• Expert-level understanding of the internals of PostgreSQL
• Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment
• Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions
• Experience in, and understanding of, data and information management, as it relates to Big Data trends and issues within businesses
• Experience owning a project from concept to production, including proposal, discussion, and execution.
• Self-motivated and self-managing, with strong organizational skills.
• Ability to thrive in a fully remote organization, however with some overlapping hours with the rest of the team

A Plus if you Have

• Big Data Management experience (this is a huge plus)
• Knowledge of BigQuery, BigTable, TensorFlow (this is a huge plus) (Our platform is on GCP)
• Knowledge of BigQuery, BigTable, TensorFlow
• Experience with PostgreSQL sharding techniques
• Experience with owning the operations of large PostgreSQL production database infrastructure
• Experience in a peak performance organization, preferably a tech startup, or high growth platform
• Experience working the the marketing automation / CRM / B2B software industry
• Experience working with a remote team
• Mid to Enterprise software company experience
• Developer platform/tool industry experience
• Experience working with a global or otherwise multicultural team
• Passion for/experience with open source and developer tools
• Experience with AWS RedShift, Kinesis, BigQuery, GCP Cloud SQL, whatever Azure's big datasets products are, and Data Pipeline