Requirements
- 5+ years operating PostgreSQL in high-volume production environments, including performance tuning, replication, backup/restore, upgrades, and incident troubleshooting.
- Strong understanding of PostgreSQL internals and operations: MVCC, transaction isolation, locks, WAL, checkpoints, autovacuum, bloat, statistics, query planner behavior, partitioning, and index strategy.
- Hands-on experience with high availability and read scaling: streaming replication, replication slots, failover, lag management, PITR, backups, and disaster-recovery drills.
- Experience with connection pooling and traffic management for PostgreSQL, especially PgBouncer, HAProxy, Kubernetes service routing, or comparable patterns.
- Practical VectorDB or vector search experience, such as pgvector, Qdrant, Milvus, Weaviate, OpenSearch vector search, or similar systems.
- Ability to reason about vector index types and operational tradeoffs, including HNSW/IVFFlat-style indexes, recall, latency, memory, ingestion throughput, metadata filters, rebuilds, and versioned embeddings.
- Practical experience with CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code workflows. Terraform experience is ideal.
- Solid cloud, Linux, storage, and networking fundamentals.
- Experience with containers and orchestration platforms, including building container images and managing Kubernetes workloads at scale.
- Strong security instincts around access control, credential lifecycle, encryption, auditability, upgrade processes, and safe operational workflows.
- Observability expertise: monitoring, alerting hygiene, SLOs, dashboards, query-level visibility, and readiness for incident response.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to partner with stakeholders, negotiate long-term plans, write formal documentation, and tie success to specific metrics and KPIs.
Nice to Have
- Experience with SRE methodologies such as error budgets, operational reviews, reliability programs, and failure exercises.
- Strong scripting or programming ability, preferably Python, Go, or Rust, used to build automation and internal tools.
- Hands-on experience with GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
- Exposure to multi-region, multi-datacenter, or active/passive disaster-recovery designs.
- Experience supporting AI, retrieval, personalization, fraud, search, or recommendation systems that depend on embeddings or hybrid search.
- Interest in cryptocurrency or decentralized systems.
Additional Information
- Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.
- Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.
- We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.
- Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto. We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision. As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.
