Database Architect / DBA

About BlastPoint

BlastPoint is a B2B data analytics startup located in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. We give companies the power to engage with customers more effectively by discovering the humans in their data and understanding customer journeys. Serving diverse industries including energy, finance, retail, and transportation, BlastPoint’s Customer Intelligence Platform makes data accessible to business users so they can plan solutions to customer-facing challenges, from encouraging green behavior to managing customers’ financial stress. Founded in 2016 by Carnegie Mellon Alumni, we are a tight-knit, forward-thinking team. 

 

Why You Should Work for Us

• Solve Challenging Problems: BlastPoint’s platform incorporates cutting-edge approaches to geospatial data, psychographic clustering, data enrichment and a dynamic visualization environment, all at scale. We’re working to break new ground by pulling insights from high-dimensional data. And we’re pushing ourselves to try new and better ways to approach every step of our process.
• Have An Impact: Small but mighty, BlastPoint’s growth is due to big companies increasingly trusting us with supporting key decisions using their most sensitive data.  What we do positively impacts the lives of millions of Americans (and beyond).
• Make Positive Change in the World: Our solutions reduce paper consumption, help struggling families pay their bills, and promote clean energy.  We also offer our platform for free to nonprofits and civic-oriented organizations.
• Employee-Focused Culture: We support the individual needs of our team, offering schedule and work-from-home flexibility, health insurance, 401K, and three weeks of PTO.  We also tailor growth opportunities, from skills training to industry conferences.
• Equal Opportunity Employer: BlastPoint is committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workplace, ensuring equal employment opportunities for individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or genetics.

Our Values

Everybody matters
We beat expectations
Innovation built on a foundation
Cards on the table, always
"The smartest systems from the most 
comprehensive data built by the best people”

---

 

Salary Range: Base:$130K-160K

About the Role

About the Role

BlastPoint is hiring a Database Architect / DBA to help strengthen the foundation of the data systems that power our SaaS platform.

This role is for someone who brings strong ownership, practical judgment, and structure to a data-heavy environment. We are looking for a hands-on database leader who can partner across Engineering, Data Engineering, DevOps, Security, Product, and Data Science to improve how our systems scale, perform, and support customer needs.

The right person will be comfortable working in a lean, fast-moving environment where they may need to move from strategy to execution quickly. They should be able to assess what is working today, identify where risk or complexity exists, and help the team make smart, scalable decisions.

AI is an important part of how we expect this person to work. We are looking for someone who can use AI as a co-engineer to move faster, improve analysis and documentation, troubleshoot issues, and strengthen database workflows while still applying sound judgment around production systems, security, privacy, and compliance.

You will help shape database practices that support a growing SaaS platform serving customers with varied data, security, and compliance requirements.

Primary Job Responsibilities

• Own database architecture, performance, reliability, security, and scalability for core platform systems.
• Use AI tools responsibly to accelerate database analysis, documentation, query tuning, troubleshooting, and workflow improvement.
• Design database approaches for both single-tenant and multi-tenant SaaS environments, including migration strategies between tenancy models.
• Improve tenant isolation, customer-specific data separation, scalability, and compliance-ready data architecture.
• Review and improve schemas, indexes, queries, migrations, and data access patterns.
• Optimize SQL performance, indexing strategies, execution plans, and database bottlenecks.
• Partner with Engineering and Data Engineering on schema design, data modeling, migrations, pipelines, and performance-sensitive application changes.
• Help define database strategies across OLTP systems, OLAP workloads, reporting layers, and data pipelines.
• Strengthen database security practices, including encryption at rest, field-level encryption, column-level encryption, key management, access controls, and auditability.
• Establish practical standards for database migrations, rollback planning, production readiness, monitoring, backups, and disaster recovery.
• Support load testing, capacity planning, and performance benchmarking for critical workflows.
• Collaborate with DevOps on AWS-hosted database infrastructure, environment strategy, access controls, and cost optimization.

Job Qualifications and Skills

• 7+ years of experience in database administration, database architecture, data engineering, or backend systems engineering.
• Strong experience supporting production databases for SaaS, analytics, data-heavy, or customer-facing platforms.
• Comfort using AI tools as part of database engineering, analysis, documentation, troubleshooting, and workflow improvement.
• Background working with single-tenant and multi-tenant SaaS architectures.
• Strong understanding of tenant isolation, shared database models, dedicated database models, and hybrid tenancy approaches.
• Deep experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, or similar.
• Strong knowledge of SQL performance tuning, indexing, query planning, schema design, and database internals.
• Understanding of OLTP and OLAP strategies, including when to separate transactional, analytical, reporting, and pipeline workloads.
• Data engineering exposure, including experience with data models, pipelines, warehouse or lakehouse patterns, ETL or ELT workflows, or analytics infrastructure.
• Understanding of database encryption patterns, including encryption at rest, field-level encryption, column-level encryption, key management, and secure access controls.
• Experience designing database systems that support varied industry, regulatory, security, and compliance requirements.
• Familiarity with cloud-hosted database environments, preferably AWS RDS, Aurora, Redshift, or related AWS data services.
• Ability to work independently in a lean, fast-moving engineering environment.
• Strong communication skills, especially around explaining technical tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations.
• Strong ownership, practical judgment, and ability to create structure from ambiguity.

Benefits

• Base Salary + Equity (Ownership in BlastPoint)
• Home Office: $500 stipend
• Health: Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Time Off: 3 weeks paid vacation, 10 paid holidays, unlimited sick time
• Retirement: 401(k)