Staff Software Engineer, PostgreSQL

About the role

You'll own Gamma's PostgreSQL infrastructure as we scale from 70 million users to hundreds of millions, and from terabytes of data to hundreds of terabytes. Your job is to make sure our database can handle orders of magnitude more usage without compromising performance. That means architecting horizontal scaling solutions, solving our hardest data challenges, and building the foundation that every feature and every user interaction depends on.

This is a deeply technical, hands-on role. You'll read and write code daily, dig into low-level systems, debug complex issues across massive datasets, and work on both core database scaling projects and application features. You'll collaborate closely with backend engineers, data engineers, and infrastructure teams to ensure our database architecture keeps pace with Gamma's growth.

Our team has a strong in-office culture and works in person 4–5 days per week in San Francisco. We love working together to stay creative and connected, with flexibility to work from home when focus matters most.

What you'll do

• Architect and implement solutions for horizontally scaling PostgreSQL to hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of terabytes of data

• Own database performance, availability, and reliability as usage grows by orders of magnitude

• Debug complex issues across very large datasets and optimize query performance at scale

• Establish best practices for database design, query optimization, and data modeling across engineering

• Work across core infrastructure and application features that depend on database architecture

• Collaborate with backend, data, and infrastructure engineers to align database strategy with product needs

What you'll bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in large-scale relational database systems, including hands-on experience managing hundreds of terabytes of data in production

• Expert-level understanding of PostgreSQL (or comparable relational databases), horizontal scaling techniques such as sharding and partitioning, and complex query tuning

• Strong programming skills in at least one backend language, with experience writing and maintaining highly available web APIs

• Experience with large-scale event streaming systems, preferably Apache Kafka

• Ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to engineers across teams

• Familiarity with TypeScript, Prisma, Apollo GraphQL, Terraform, AWS, or AI/LLM tooling (Nice to have)

Compensation range:

The base salary for this full-time position, which spans multiple internal levels depending on qualifications, ranges between $230K - $310K plus benefits & equity.

Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including but not limited to experience and expertise in the requirements listed above.

If you're interested in this role but you don't meet every requirement, we encourage you to apply anyway! We're always excited about meeting great people.