What are the responsibilities and job description for the Principal Database Engineer position at Stax Payments?
Description
As a Principal Database Engineer, you will set the technical direction for our database platforms and partner with engineering teams to ensure scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency. This is not a traditional DBA role. Instead, you will design, build, and automate cloud-native database solutions that power our products and internal systems at scale. You will join our Database Engineering team and act as a senior technical leader, hands-on with architecture and automation, while also mentoring others and influencing how we approach data infrastructure across the company.
What You’ll Do
As a Principal Database Engineer, you will set the technical direction for our database platforms and partner with engineering teams to ensure scalability, reliability, security, and cost efficiency. This is not a traditional DBA role. Instead, you will design, build, and automate cloud-native database solutions that power our products and internal systems at scale. You will join our Database Engineering team and act as a senior technical leader, hands-on with architecture and automation, while also mentoring others and influencing how we approach data infrastructure across the company.
What You’ll Do
- Own the data platform: Design, implement, and evolve database systems (Aurora, RDS, Redshift, etc.) that meet performance, resiliency, and compliance requirements.
- Automate relentlessly: Build infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines for database changes, and self-service tooling for developers.
- Enable scalability: Architect solutions that support growth, high availability, and disaster recovery in a multi-account AWS environment.
- Champion observability: Implement monitoring, alerting, and performance tuning strategies to ensure proactive issue detection and resolution.
- Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with application engineers, cloud engineers, and security to align database practices with organizational goals.
- Drive modernization: Lead the migration from legacy systems to cloud-first platforms, ensuring minimal disruption and long-term maintainability.
- Mentor and guide: Elevate the skills of the Database Engineering team, sharing best practices and setting technical standards.
- Proven experience as a Senior or Principal Database Engineer with expertise in multiple cloud-native databases (MySQL [Primary Focus], Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL)
- Strong hands-on skills with AWS data services (Aurora, Redshift, RDS, S3).
- Deep understanding of database performance, query optimization, indexing, partitioning, and replication strategies.
- Strong background in automation and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or CDK).
- Proficiency in at least one of the following languages: TypeScript, Python, C#, or Go, with the ability to navigate existing codebases and build new tooling for deployment as standalone applications or serverless functions (e.g., AWS Lambda).
- Experience with observability stacks (Datadog, CloudWatch, or similar).
- Strong grasp of security, compliance, and cost optimization in cloud environments.
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills.
- Experience with user access management systems (SSO, SCIM, SAML, OIDC)
- Exposure to data pipelines, ETL, or event-driven architectures (Kinesis, Kafka).
- Knowledge of security principles such as Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) and Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)
- Familiarity with encryption strategies for data at rest and in transit (e.g., KMS, TLS, customer-managed keys, envelope encryption)
- Awareness of compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA) and how they affect data platform design
