Principal Database Administrator (DBA) (Remote - Europe)
We are looking for a Principal Database Administrator to serve as the ultimate reliability owner of Finom’s banking database infrastructure. At Finom, our data is the heartbeat of our services; we need a visionary engineer who can balance high-level architectural strategy with a "roll-up-your-sleeves" approach to implementation and operations.
Own Database Reliability: Drive high availability and disaster recovery strategies, ensuring RPO/RTO targets are met for our core banking systems.
Architect for Scale: Define and execute the scalability roadmap, including partitioning, sharding strategies, and capacity forecasting.
Optimize Performance: Perform deep-dive query optimization, execution plan analysis, and proactive bottleneck remediation.
Design Infrastructure: Build and manage scalable inference and connection pooling strategies (PgBouncer) and robust backup/restore automations.
Establish Observability: Design the monitoring architecture (Prometheus, Grafana, VictoriaMetrics) and define SLIs/SLOs for database health.
Champion Security: Implement banking-grade security practices, including credential management and compliance-aligned data handling.
Partner Across Engineering: Work with product teams to ensure database schema changes and architectural decisions support a high-load environment.
Lead by Example: Set the technical bar for the DBA function through mentoring, standards definition, and hands-on implementation.
Technical Authority: You possess a deep, "under-the-hood" understanding of PostgreSQL internals (MVCC, WAL, vacuum, etc.)
Reliability-First: You understand that in fintech, data integrity and availability are non-negotiable.
Pragmatic Architect: You can turn complex business requirements into robust, scalable data models.
Autonomous Leader: You are comfortable taking full ownership of the database landscape without heavy supervision.
Clear Communicator: You can explain complex architectural trade-offs to both engineers and stakeholders.
5+ years of experience as a PostgreSQL DBA in high-load, production environments (preferably Fintech or mission-critical systems).
Deep PostgreSQL Expertise: Advanced knowledge of index design (B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN), partitioning, and vacuum tuning.
HA/DR Mastery: Proven experience designing streaming replication, clustering, and automated backup validation.
Cloud Fluency: Hands-on experience with cloud-managed PostgreSQL (specifically GCP) and Linux systems administration.
Automation Mindset: Proficient with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD workflows (GitLab, ArgoCD).
Strong SQL Skills: Expertise in complex queries, stored procedures, and functions.
Observability Stack: Experience building monitoring and alerting for databases (Prometheus/Grafana).
Fluent English
Compliance Experience: Working within frameworks like PCI DSS or GDPR.
Multi-Stack Experience: Familiarity with Redis, BigQuery, or additional data systems (Cassandra, ClickHouse).
Advanced Tooling: Experience with various connection pooling tools beyond PgBouncer.
Security Pro: Deep knowledge of secure secrets and credential management practices.
GCP (primary cloud, ~90%)
GKE (Kubernetes)
GitLab CI
Terraform
ArgoCD (GitOps)
Kafka (Confluent)
Vault
Prometheus / Grafana
Cloud Logging
PostgreSQL
