Senior Data Systems Engineer (PostgreSQL)

Job Description

Company: Plot
Location: New York City
Workplace Type: On-site
Employment Type: Full-time

About the Role

Plot is building the next generation of social intelligence — an AI-native platform that helps some of the world’s most influential brands understand culture, find emerging trends, and activate their communities at scale. Supported by the co-founders of Reddit and Plaid, we operate at the intersection of applied AI and large-scale data systems, turning millions of short-form videos every day into structured representations of culture and consumer behavior.

You will join a small, high-ownership engineering team taking end-to-end responsibility for our core data tier, working directly with founders to shape foundational architecture and build data infrastructure designed to scale for years to come.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

• Own Core Data Systems: Take primary responsibility for how millions of enriched videos flow from ingestion through storage, analytics, and product surfaces.
• Harden High-Throughput Write Paths: Diagnose failure modes, decrease error rates, and ensure continuous data ingestion pipelines remain reliable, observable, and predictable.
• Tune Data Access & Concurrency: Ensure dashboards and analytical queries remain responsive during high-volume concurrent write workloads.
• Isolate Workloads: Separate transactional and analytical concerns, leading decisions on workload placement and building contracts to prevent query contention.
• Design Read-Optimized Schemas: Develop read-optimized models, aggregations, rollups, and partitioning strategies tailored to actual query access patterns by humans and AI agents.
• Enable AI-Native Analytics: Guide internal tools and AI agents to query structured data efficiently without resorting to brute-force table scans.
• Lead Architectural Decisions: Evaluate system tradeoffs, author RFCs, and guide the evolution of Plot’s data platform.
• Drive Operational Excellence: Define best practices, elevate data reliability and performance across the engineering team, and act as the subject matter expert for data systems.

Requirements & Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant experience in data systems engineering, database administration, or data infrastructure.
• Deep PostgreSQL Expertise: Hands-on operational experience running PostgreSQL in high-concurrency production environments, including deep knowledge of partitioning, locking mechanisms, autovacuum tuning, and connection pooling.
• Systems Intuition: Proven ability to identify bottlenecks, diagnose subtle failure modes, and evaluate architectural tradeoffs.
• Data Architecture Design: Experience designing and maintaining analytical schemas, read-optimized data models, and high-volume query patterns.
• High Ownership: Comfort navigating ambiguous technical environments, digging into logs and performance metrics, and delivering pragmatic, reliable solutions.
• No degree requirements.