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Staff Systems Engineer, Databases
Inscribe
Source: Headcount Labs · original listing ↗
Job data: Headcount Labs, ODbL 1.0. Job descriptions belong to their employers.
Posted 5 days ago
About this role
ABOUT INSCRIBE At Inscribe, we're on a mission to catch fraud with confidence. In 2017, we set out to build the first document fraud detection product. Today, we process millions of applications each year and work with many of the leading fintechs and banks across the U.S. We believe the game of cat-and-mouse in fraud requires a fundamentally new approach. With care for our customers, attention to detail, and grounded execution, we’re reimagining how fraud is detected and prevented. Inscribe is trusted by leading banks and fintechs, including Coinbase, Plaid, Bluevine, and Ramp. Inscribe is backed by Threshold Ventures, Uncork Capital, Y Combinator, Crosslink Capital, and Foundry, and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. The Opportunity Inscribe is scaling quickly, and our platform sits at the heart of our customers’ fraud workflows. Every document we analyse and every real-time API decision depends on datastores that are fast, available, and built to grow. We’re hiring a Staff Systems Engineer (Databases) to own how we run, scale, and deploy our databases in the cloud. This role blends database engineering, site reliability, cloud architecture, and platform automation. You’ll own the reliability and performance of our data layer, from query plans and indexing to replication, failover, backups, and cost. You’ll make sure that as customer volumes and data grow, our datastores stay fast, stable, and cost-efficient. We’re looking for a high-agency engineer who can assess our data infrastructure today, find what won’t scale, and fix it in line with business goals. This is a hands-on role for someone who thinks in systems, treats databases as a product for other engineers, and raises the bar for data reliability across the company. Responsibilities - Own the design, operation, and scaling of our datastores (Postgres, Redis) on AWS, including provisioning, configuration, replication, high availability, and disaster recovery. - Lead datastore optimization: query and index tuning, schema design, connection pooling, caching strategies, and maintenance work such as vacuuming, bloat management, and partitioning. - Plan and carry out database scaling as data volumes grow, using read replicas, partitioning, archival, sharding, and horizontal scaling where needed, ahead of demand rather than in response to incidents. - Define and run database reliability practices: SLOs for the data layer, backup and point-in-time recovery testing, failover drills, defined RPO/RTO targets, and incident runbooks. - Optimize deployment pipelines, test environments, and release automation to improve developer efficiency and reduce operational risk, including safe zero-downtime schema migrations and realistic test databases. - Manage cloud database deployments as code with Terraform, standardising how databases are created, configured, upgraded, and retired. - Drive cloud optimization for the data tier by rightsizing instances, tuning storage and IOPS, managing reserved capacity, and making cost visible to the teams that create it. - Build observability for the data layer in Datadog and Grafana, covering query latency, replication lag, connection saturation, storage growth, and cost, with alerts that are useful to act on. - Work with product engineers on data models and access patterns so new features scale from launch. - Embed security and compliance controls such as encryption, access management, auditing, and network isolation into how our datastores are run. - Lead data infrastructure projects from roadmap through rollout, anchored in business impact and product goals. - Mentor teammates and set a high standard for engineering quality, documentation, and operational rigor. Tech Stack We don’t expect candidates to know everything, but experience in most of these areas will help: - Cloud: AWS (RDS/Aurora, ECS, S3, Bedrock, etc.) - Datastores: Postgres, Redis - Infrastructure: Terraform, Docker - Observability: Datadog, Grafana - Languages: Python (Django), SQL - AI Platforms: Anthropic, AWS Bedrock About You Essential - 6+ years of hands-on experience in database reliability engineering, data platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps, with substantial time running production databases. - Deep Postgres expertise: query planning, indexing, replication, upgrades, and diagnosing performance problems under real production load. - Proven experience scaling datastores in a high-growth environment, including migrations, sharding and capacity planning. - Experience deploying and operating managed databases on AWS (or another major cloud) through infrastructure as code. - Strong Python skills and comfort working in an application codebase, including ORM-generated queries (Django experience is a plus). - Experience building CI/CD and release automation, especially safe schema migrations in continuous delivery. - A track record of cutting cloud spend without giving up reliability. - A business-aware, pragmatic approach: you connect data infrastructure decisions to product goals and growth, and balance short-term delivery with long-term design. Highly sought - Experience with distributed or horizontally scalable databases (for example Aurora, Citus, CockroachDB, or YugabyteDB). - Experience with migration patterns such as CDC and logical replication, with verification and rollback. - Experience building internal database tooling or “database-as-a-service” style platforms for product teams. - Familiarity with security and compliance requirements for sensitive financial or identity data. BENEFITS At Inscribe, we are building a company and culture where everyone can produce their best work. Here are a few of our benefits and perks: - Competitive salary and meaningful equity - Comprehensive healthcare - Unlimited vacation policy - 401(k) and pension plans - Complete work setup - Monthly wellness stipend Inscribe provides equity employment opportunities to all employees and applicants and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type with regards to race, color, religion or religious belief, ethnic or national origin, nationality, sex, genetics, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, military or veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by applicable local, state, or federal laws or prohibited by company policy.