Senior Database Engineer | Enterprise SaaS | Melbourne
A well established Australian enterprise software company is hiring a Senior Database Engineer to architect and build the PostgreSQL data platform underpinning its cloud-native SaaS product. This is a greenfield role with genuine technical depth, spanning schema design, migration delivery, performance engineering, and CI/CD integration for database change management.
The company is migrating customers off a legacy ServiceNow-based platform into a purpose-built PostgreSQL environment on AWS. You will own that journey end to end.
The Role:
You will be responsible for the full database lifecycle across a multi-tenant SaaS platform. That means data model design and schema architecture, query optimisation and execution plan analysis, replication and HA/DR strategy, and CI/CD pipeline integration for schema migrations. You will work closely with the engineering and platform teams to ensure the data layer meets strict security and compliance requirements, particularly around customer isolation and non-functional controls.
As the company scales its AI-assisted product offering, this role will also shape the data architecture that supports it.
What You Bring
- Deep PostgreSQL expertise in production environments, including performance tuning, index strategy (B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN), MVCC and vacuum behaviour, and lock/deadlock analysis
- Hands-on experience with multi-tenant SaaS data design, including row-level security, schema-per-tenant patterns, and customer data isolation
- Strong understanding of PostgreSQL internals such as WAL configuration, TOAST, shared_buffers and work_mem tuning, checkpoint management, and bloat remediation (pg_repack or similar)
- Practical experience with HA tooling such as Patroni, Repmgr, or pg_auto_failover, and backup/recovery tools like pgBackRest, Barman, or WAL-G
- Confidence with monitoring and observability using pg_stat_statements, pg_stat_activity, pg_stat_kcache, pgBadger, or equivalent
- Schema migration tooling experience with Flyway, Liquibase, sqitch, or Alembic, integrated into CI/CD pipelines
- AWS database experience, ideally RDS or Aurora, with IaC exposure (CloudFormation, Sceptre, or Terraform)
- Security-first mindset with an understanding of compliance requirements in a regulated SaaS environment
- Experience delivering platform or legacy migration projects is a significant advantage
Why This Role
- Genuine architecture ownership, not ticket-driven DBA work
- Migration and greenfield scope in the same role
- Exposure to a scaling AI platform
- Employer of choice with strong retention and career development
- Employee share plan, flexible working, and a collaborative Melbourne-based engineering team
This role reports into the Engineering Lead with close collaboration across platform and security functions.
If this sounds like your kind of problem, get in touch.