• Operate and evolve multi-region CockroachDB clusters and PostgreSQL instances across production, staging, and development environments • Own query performance: identify regressions, tune execution plans, advise application teams on schema design and access patterns • Manage database capacity planning, scaling events, and upgrade cycles with minimal customer impact • Design and enforce standards for schema changes, migrations, and data lifecycle management • Build and maintain database observability: dashboards, alerting, anomaly detection, and SLO tracking (Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalent) • Participate in on-call rotations and incident response for data-layer issues • Drive blameless postmortems and durable remediation • Instrument databases and surrounding infrastructure to surface leading indicators of degradation before they become incidents • Automate provisioning, configuration, backup, and recovery using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar) • Build and maintain internal tooling for database management, monitoring, and self-service operations • Collaborate with platform engineering on CI/CD pipelines, deployment safety, and change management for database-touching services • Implement and audit access controls, authentication, authorization, and encryption at rest and in transit • Support compliance requirements related to data protection, audit logging, and retention policies • Use AI tools (LLMs, code assistants, natural-language query analysis) to accelerate troubleshooting, documentation, code generation, and operational runbooks • Evaluate and integrate AI-assisted observability and anomaly detection tooling into database operations • Contribute to internal knowledge sharing on effective use of AI in database engineering workflows • Establish and maintain a Database Center of Excellence: documentation, standards, best practices, and reusable patterns • Mentor engineers on database fundamentals, distributed systems behavior, and operational discipline • Stay current with CockroachDB, PostgreSQL, and broader data infrastructure developments. • Bring what you learn back to the team.