Senior PostgreSQL DBA (AWS/RDS)

📍 Eindhoven HQ — Hybrid (1 day/week in office)

Yes, we support with relocation! If you resonate with this role and aren't yet based in the Netherlands - don't hesitate to apply!

 

🗂️ Role Overview

Job Title	Senior PostgreSQL DBA (AWS / RDS)
Department	Platform
Reports To	Head of Platform Engineering
Location	Eindhoven HQ — Hybrid (1 day/week in office)
Employment Type	Full-time
Seniority Level	Senior
Salary	Minimum €72.000 annual, incl. 8% holiday allowance

 

🚀 This is what you tell people at parties

We didn’t become Europe’s leading e-commerce shipping platform by playing it safe. Sendcloud powers 30,000+ online retailers, marketplaces, and fulfillment companies — helping them ship smarter, grow faster, and actually get things done for their customers. Boring logistics? Not here. We’re building the platform that solves shipping, at scale, globally!

 

Our data layer is the backbone of everything we build. As we scale, the complexity grows — and we need a seasoned PostgreSQL DBA to take ownership of our database estate, drive reliability, and raise the bar for how our engineering teams work with data. This is a hands-on, high-impact role sitting within our Platform Services domain.

 

🧐 The Role

As our Senior PostgreSQL DBA, you own the technical and operational health of our PostgreSQL estate. Reporting to the Head of Platform Engineering, you sit at the intersection of infrastructure, backend engineering, and data architecture. Your mission is to strengthen our core database practices, eliminate performance bottlenecks, and proactively enable engineering teams to work with PostgreSQL at scale — reliably, efficiently, and securely.

 

🎯 What you’ll do

Hands-On PostgreSQL Ownership

• Operate and continuously improve our PostgreSQL clusters running on AWS RDS and Aurora
• Analyse and optimise complex queries, indexes, and schemas to eliminate performance bottlenecks
• Monitor database health — slow queries, replication lag, resource utilisation — and tune proactively
• Own our backup and disaster-recovery strategy, including regular restore testing and clear RTO/RPO targets
• Plan and execute PostgreSQL major-version upgrades and zero-downtime schema migrations on live systems
• Join the on-call rotation for database incidents, lead investigations and resolution, and run blameless postmortems
• Implement database access controls, encryption, and auditing in line with GDPR and our data-handling requirements

Database Design & Architecture

• Design scalable PostgreSQL schemas for microservices environments and larger applications
• Guide feature teams on data design patterns, scaling challenges, read/write strategies, and data migrations
• Drive decisions around partitioning, denormalisation, replication, and indexing
• Build security into schema design — row-level security policies, least-privilege access for sensitive tables

Cross-Engineering Enablement

• Lead our PostgreSQL enablement efforts — training, playbooks, checklists, and ‘DB Hygiene 101’ guidelines
• Act as a trusted advisor to engineers across feature teams on all things PostgreSQL
• Collaborate with Platform and Product Engineering on observability, alerting, and long-term database strategy
• Stay current with new PostgreSQL and AWS RDS capabilities, and bring the useful ones to the team

 

✅ What you bring to the table

Personally

• You are ownership-driven, proactive, and reliability-obsessed — you spot risks before they become incidents
• You thrive in cross-functional environments where you influence technical decisions without direct authority
• You are motivated by enabling other engineers to do better work, and you communicate complex trade-offs clearly

Professionally

• 5+ years of professional experience in database engineering or administration, with PostgreSQL as your primary focus
• 4+ years of hands-on PostgreSQL experience in high-availability, production environments
• 3+ years operating PostgreSQL on AWS (RDS or Aurora), including backup strategies, replication, monitoring, and performance tuning
• 3+ years working in cloud-native / SaaS environments, preferably in a microservices-based architecture
• Strong command of PostgreSQL internals: planner, vacuuming, WAL, query plans
• Proven track record of solving query and performance bottlenecks at scale
• Solid experience with monitoring tools (e.g. pg_stat_statements, pgBadger, Datadog, CloudWatch)
• Experience with infrastructure as code and DevOps practices (Git, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines)
• Understanding of Kubernetes-based environments and how databases interact with containerised workloads
• Comfortable reading Python application code using ORMs such as SQLAlchemy or Django ORM
• Strong cross-functional collaboration experience with Platform and Backend teams
• Writes documentation and runbooks that other engineers can actually follow

Nice to Have

• Experience with connection pooling (e.g. RDS Proxy) in high-concurrency environments
• Experience defining PostgreSQL data governance, versioning, or lifecycle policies
• Contributions to open-source PostgreSQL tooling or internal libraries

 

❤️ Our Values

💩  No bullshit: Big egos suck. Be open, honest, and transparent. Share your mistakes openly and learn from them. Don’t just talk about problems — solve them.

🎯  Grow & Win: Be highly curious, adaptable, and proactive. Embrace discomfort and change. Keep an open mindset and learn from others. You invest in our growth, so we invest in yours.

🎠  Have fun: Work hard, laugh harder. Not everything has to be serious. Be yourself, especially if you’re the good kind of crazy. Sendcloud is an adventure, not a corporate maze — enjoy the ride.

 

🎉 Benefits

🧠 Brain	€2,000 learning budget · Courses, certifications & conferences · Growth in an international team
🌴 Time	28 days paid vacation/year · Extra day off on your birthday · Swap public holidays for meaningful ones
✈️ Sabbatical	4 weeks fully paid every 3 years
🏡 Home	Flexible hybrid model (1 day/week in office) · €500 home office budget
💪 Body	Company gym · Free lunch every Monday · Fresh fruit · Barista coffee
🚌 Travel	Monthly commuting allowance
🪑 Future	Pension scheme · Employee discount programs
🐾 Vibe	Dog-friendly office · After-hours drinks at the Sendcloud Bar

 

Questions about this role? Reach out to Talent Acquisition.