Principal Postgres Database Engineer

Compensation and benefits

Salary :

USD 170,000 - 210,000 per year

Equity : 0.4 - 0.6%

Benefits :

Hardware setup of choice, flexible work hours, optional desk at a local coworking space or in our SF office, health insurance (premiums 100% covered, incl dependents), 401k match (4%)

About pganalyze

At pganalyze, we’re redefining how developers optimize one of the world’s most popular databases, PostgreSQL. Our software gives companies like Atlassian, Robinhood, and Notion the tools to solve their most complex Postgres performance challenges, ensuring their mission-critical applications run smoothly at scale.

By joining us, you’ll tackle the complex technical and user experience problems at the heart of large Postgres deployments, collaborate with a passionate team and open source community, and, together, help shape the future of Postgres. Our product is heavy on automated analysis and custom visualizations, and we build advisors to make automatic recommendations, such as the best index to fix a slow query.

We are a fully remote company, with the core team based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our company is independent, self-funded, and profitable, giving us complete control over our product roadmap and priorities. We emphasize autonomy and focus time by having few meetings per week.

We welcome people of different backgrounds, abilities, experiences and perspectives. Having a work environment that is diverse, inclusive and focuses on learning from one another is central to how we operate. Working together is a form of community, and we care about the shared spaces being safe and supportive.

About the role

When we started pganalyze, one thing was clear to us : We are 100% focused on Postgres, and making our customer’s Postgres databases, and their queries, perform well. But offering a product that makes Postgres better can’t happen in isolation - and we believe that being involved in upstream development with the Postgres project, and common extensions, is essential for us to continue being successful.

Over the years we’ve worked on community projects such as libpg_query (the Postgres query parser as a library), and made use of the Postgres planner turned-into-a-library in our application (for our Index Advisor). We’ve also made minor contributions to Postgres directly, be it by authoring patches, reviewing patches on pgsql-hackers, or supporting community conferences.

In this role you will take pganalyze’s involvement with the Postgres project to the next level, by contributing both minor and major patches and investing in reviews for functionality that is relevant to monitoring, query planning, and overall performance of the database. You will also continue your own efforts on making Postgres the best relational open-source database.

This role is geared towards an existing Postgres hacker who wants to continue working on open-source projects full-time, with most of it allocated to the Postgres project. Our goal is to develop a healthy feedback cycle in terms of common performance and planning bottlenecks we see with pganalyze customers, and to turn that into upstream improvements as well as open-source extensions where applicable.

You will also have the opportunity to engage with the rest of the engineering team to improve how pganalyze works, or contribute to functionality currently not open-source (such as our “query planner as a library”), but we expect that to be less than 20% of your time.

At pganalyze you will :

Spend more than 50% of your time directly working on the Postgres open-source project

Develop Postgres features and bugfixes that improve Postgres planner behaviour (e.g. to avoid pathological cases)

Advance the Postgres column and extended statistics system in order to improve query plans

Improve instrumentation of Postgres to better aid performance monitoring

Develop open-source extensions that collect additional monitoring data, such as plan statistics, parameter usage, function profiles, etc

Collaborate with the engineering team on developing pganalyze product features that optimize Postgres performance, for example by helping guide the team through complex Postgres planner issues

Benchmark Postgres changes for performance regressions

Previously, you have :

Worked professionally in a Systems Programming context with C, C++ or Rust for at least 5 years

Authored at least one complex patch to Postgres that was committed

Actively contributed to the Postgres project through patch reviews

Worked on code involving the Postgres planner, or related components such as extended statistics

Worked in a self-directed manner on an open-source project such as Postgres

Improved programs through better data structures and low-level optimizations

Optionally, you also have :

Written detailed technical documentation for using Postgres effectively

Been involved in efforts to make Postgres more accessible to new developers

Experienced the challenges of making Postgres perform well in a cloud environment (e.g. due to storage latencies)

• We're hiring for this role worldwide on a contract or employement basis (through a PEO), with the exception of citizens of Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia, Sudan, Somalia, Syria and Venezuela, unless holding permanent residency or dual citizenship in another country.

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