Staff Database Engineer

Our traction

More importantly, we’ve helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees.

Where we work

Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto. For a few of our roles we prioritize in-person collaboration at one of our office locations. Most of our teammates are distributed throughout the globe. Please review the role description and discuss with your recruiter for more details on location!

We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Database Engineer to help product teams store and access data effectively at scale. You will be the default place product engineers turn to for "which database should this live in?" and "will this access pattern hold up?" This means leading large projects like migrations and building the platform engineers interact with. You will be driving the largest, load-bearing changes to our data infrastructure.

This is a hands-on, software-engineer-first role. It is not a BI, data-warehousing, or analytics-engineering role — that work lives with our BizOps and BI teams.

This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada.

The impact you'll have

• Lead the migration of product workloads
• Give product engineers a clear home for "where should this data live and how should I access it?"
• Build reusable primitives — data-sync utilities, ORM best practices, and access-pattern / schema / index review — so teams stop reinventing patterns.
• Expand the product-data platform over time into caching, search, and event streaming.

Who you'll work with

• Product Engineering Teams
• Platform / Infrastructure Teams
• This role has company-wide impact and will partner cross-functionally across the entire engineering organization.

What we're looking for

• Hands-on experience working with databases inside the product — owning OLTP access patterns, indexing, query optimization, and schema design as part of building user-facing applications
• Comfortable both writing code in the product stack and reasoning carefully at the database layer
• Deep expertise with a major relational engine (Postgres strongly preferred) in high-volume production; experience migrating workloads (e.g., MongoDB → Postgres) a strong plus
• Expertise in schema design, indexing, query optimization, and zero-downtime migrations on large, live tables
• Experience scaling systems through significant traffic and data growth, in a domain where understanding access patterns at scale is a survival skill — e.g. advertising analytics, fintech / trading systems, large-scale consumer SaaS, or marketplaces
• Strong software engineering ability — writes, reviews, and ships production code, not SQL alone
• Flexible problem solving
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Deep sense of personal ownership and accountability
• Builder mentality

Nice to Haves

• Experience building shared platform primitives — data-sync tooling, ORM best practices, caching (Redis), search, or queues / event streaming
• Experience with payments or financial data
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and observability/performance tooling