Staff Database Administrator

Job Description

Company: Altruist
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Workplace Type: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $181,000 – $265,000

About the Role

Altruist is transforming the wealth management industry by building an AI platform for wealth professionals. We are hiring a Staff Database Administrator to join our Cloud Infrastructure & Platform team. Our clearing and brokerage platform runs on a multi-terabyte Aurora PostgreSQL estate that serves as the system of record for hundreds of thousands of brokerage accounts, millions of positions, and hundreds of thousands of trades every day. This role owns the reliability, performance, and resilience of that estate, leading multi-region disaster recovery and re-architecting data movement and replication.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

• Own the production PostgreSQL estate end to end across multi-terabyte Aurora clusters for clearing, broker-dealer, and internal workloads.
• Lead multi-region resilience: convert clusters to Aurora Global Database, instrument replication lag against RTO/RPO commitments, and run recovery drills.
• Drive database segmentation by carving critical domains out of shared clusters into dedicated instances with isolated read paths.
• Architect for high scale: capacity modeling, tenant-aware partitioning/sharding, per-domain read replicas, continuous aggregates, and connection pooling.
• Plan and execute major-version upgrades across the fleet with minimal downtime.
• Manage CDC and data movement pipelines (Debezium, Kafka/MSK, AWS DMS) for throughput, lag, and correctness.
• Establish schema-change governance, migration reviews, locking/indexing standards, and automated guardrails.
• Partner with security and compliance on encryption, row-level security, least-privilege access, and SOC 1 controls.
• Act as senior escalation point for database incidents, developing durable fixes, runbooks, and alerting.
• Build automation and self-serve tooling for product engineers while mentoring teams on database operations.

Requirements & Qualifications

• 8+ years operating production relational databases at scale, ideally handling regulated transactional data in fintech or SaaS.
• Deep PostgreSQL expertise: query planning, indexing, partitioning, autovacuum and bloat management, locking, and connection pooling.
• Hands-on experience operating Aurora or RDS at multi-terabyte scale, including major-version upgrades and parameter tuning.
• Proven multi-region disaster recovery architecture, promotion/failback mechanics, and backup/restore validation.
• Practical experience with CDC tools (Debezium, Kafka, AWS DMS) and diagnosing replication lag.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code and automation skills (Terraform, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Flyway/Liquibase).
• Strong observability instincts using pg_stat_statements, wait events, and monitoring dashboards.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications

• Expertise with AI best practices and interest in building agentic automation for database operations.
• Experience introducing database sharding or splitting monolithic databases into domain-owned clusters.
• Operational experience with MySQL, Snowflake, Redis, or OpenSearch alongside PostgreSQL.
• Kafka/MSK connector fleet management and upgrade planning experience.
• Familiarity with SOC 1, SOC 2, or financial custody/clearing platform regulations.

Benefits & Perks

• Hybrid schedule (3 days/week in-office in Culver City/Los Angeles or San Francisco).
• Competitive salary and equity compensation.
• Premium healthcare, dental, and vision insurance plans (HMO and PPO).
• 401(k) savings plan with 4% employer match and immediate vesting.
• 16 weeks paid parental leave after one year of employment.
• Annual L&D budget allocation and employee mobility programs.
• Company perks program, financial guidance program, and one-month work-from-anywhere policy.