Database Engineer, Public Sector

Postgres
UNITED STATES
October 20, 2026
Full Time
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Job Description

Company: Exiger
Location: McLean, VA (U.S.)
Workplace Type: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full-time

About the Role

Exiger is hiring a Database Engineer to own the data plane patterns our federal programs run on. Rather than administering a single program’s databases, you will build the centralized database engineering practice that every program inherits: reference schema conventions, replication and recovery patterns proven by real drills, zero-downtime migration tooling, and the security posture that keeps production data stores authorizable inside a FedRAMP boundary. The role stays hands-on, production-facing, and customer-facing.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Reference Database Posture: Own instance design, replication topology, parameter tuning, connection management, and query plan health across programs.
  • Schema Governance: Set and govern schema conventions across programs, treating schemas as an interface other engineers consume.
  • Disaster Recovery: Build backup, restore, and disaster-recovery patterns as reusable tooling, proven by real recovery drills.
  • Security & Compliance: Own database security patterns inside the FedRAMP boundary including encryption at rest and in transit, least-privilege access, and audit logging.
  • Zero-Downtime Migrations: Build and maintain zero-downtime migration and schema change tooling used on live traffic.
  • Infrastructure Collaboration: Partner with Platform Engineering on shared infrastructure seams and with Data Engineering on production-to-analytics seams.
  • Support & Escalation: Support program teams operating on your patterns and carry escalation on-call for the data plane across the portfolio.
  • Customer Engagement: Represent data posture regarding residency, retention, encryption, and access in customer-context conversations.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • 5+ years of production database engineering at scale on at least one major relational engine (PostgreSQL preferred; Aurora, MySQL, or Oracle at depth also acceptable).
  • Strong query plan literacy with the ability to read EXPLAIN ANALYZE and reason about it without a profiler.
  • Production experience with zero-downtime schema migrations on live traffic.
  • Production experience with at least one OLAP or analytics store (Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery, ClickHouse).
  • Production experience on AWS, particularly RDS / Aurora (PostgreSQL flavor preferred).
  • Hands-on experience inside a FedRAMP boundary (Moderate or High).
  • Experience building database patterns, tooling, or standards consumed by teams beyond your own (central DBRE / DBA practice experience).
  • Familiarity with the database side of an ATO continuous-monitoring cycle.
  • Strong customer-facing posture explaining data residency, retention, and encryption decisions.
  • Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications

  • Hands-on experience with both row-store and column-store engines in the same environment.
  • Familiarity with logical replication topologies (Postgres logical replication, AWS DMS) for CDC into analytics layers.
  • Experience with vector storage (pgvector, OpenSearch k-NN, Pinecone) for ML retrieval workloads.
  • Experience with database security tooling at federal grade (TDE, Vault, AWS KMS with customer-managed keys).
  • PostGIS or other spatial extension experience for geospatial domains.
  • Experience operating in IL5, IL6, or JWICS environments.
  • Active U.S. Government security clearance (Secret minimum, TS or TS/SCI for a subset).

Benefits & Perks

  • Discretionary Time Off for all employees with no maximum limits on time off.
  • Industry leading health, vision, and dental benefits.
  • Competitive compensation package.
  • 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave.
  • Flexible, hybrid approach to working from home and in the office.
  • Focus on wellness and employee health through stipends and dedicated wellness programming.
  • Purposeful career development programs with reimbursement provided for educational certifications.

Exiger is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

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