Senior Database Administrator

📍This is a hybrid position based at our HQ in Eindhoven (1 day per week at the office)

This Is What You Say at Parties 👋

We’re Sendcloud – Europe’s #1 shipping platform for e-commerce. We help online retailers, marketplaces, and fulfillment companies scale their operations and deliver standout shipping experiences. Over 25,000 e-commerce businesses trust us to simplify and supercharge their shipping. And we’re just getting started.

What can you expect from this role? 🧐

While our engineering teams build innovative features and own their services, we face increasing complexity at the data layer. Challenges with query efficiency, performance bottlenecks, oversized database instances, and a lack of cross-team DB knowledge are emerging as we scale.

We’re now hiring a Senior Hands-on DBA to join the Platform Services domain and to strengthen our core data practices, enhance reliability, and raise the engineering bar across the organization.

This role is not just another DBA. We're looking for someone who:

• Owns our database stack and general data flows technically and operationally
  
  
• Can get hands dirty - optimize queries, monitor performance, tune resources
  
  
• Drives cross-engineering education and enablement - helping backend devs level up their DB hygiene
  
  
• Brings architecture-level thinking to design resilient, cost-efficient, and scalable data solutions, including caching, streams, SQL and No-SQL solutions

What will you do in this role? 

Hands-On Ownership

• Operate and improve our PostgreSQL clusters running on AWS RDS and Aurora
  
  
• Analyze and optimize complex queries, indexes, and schemas
  
  
• Advise on and improve our No-SQL and caching solutions, primarily Redis/Valkey
  
  
• Operate and maintain our stream and events platforms using NATS and RabbitMQ
  
  
• Monitor data platforms health (slow queries, replication lag, resource utilization) and tune performance
  
  
• Collaborate with Platform and Product engineers on observability, alerting and backups
  
  

Architecture & Engineering Leadership

• Design and advocate for scalable DB schemas and solutions in a microservices environment as well as for larger applications
  
  
• Work closely with feature teams on data design patterns, DB scaling challenges, read/write strategies and data migrations
  
  
• Guide decisions around caching, partitioning, denormalization, replication, etc.
  
  
• Control usage of the right data tools for the right job, such as NoSQL datastores and event systems
  
  

Cross-Engineering Enablement

• Be a driving force of “DB Engineering Enablement” program for engineering teams
  
  
• Training, playbooks, checklists, ‘DB Hygiene 101’ guidelines
  
  
• Act as a trusted advisor to Engineers in feature teams
  
  
• Evangelize performance awareness and operational excellence for data platforms
  
  

Collaboration & Innovation

• Work with our Platform and Product Engineering teams to ensure data reliability, performance, and scalability
  
  
• Influence our long-term data architecture strategy, including tooling, observability, and cost-efficiency
  
  
• Stay on top of emerging PostgreSQL and AWS RDS capabilities, bringing innovative practices to the team

Our perfect match 💗

• 8+ years of professional experience in database engineering, administration, or architecture roles
  
  
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, ideally 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
  
  
• Experience designing or evolving database schemas for high-traffic applications
  
  
• Solid experience with monitoring tools (e.g., pg_stat_statements, pgBadger, Datadog, CloudWatch, etc.)
  
  
• Familiarity with caching strategies (Redis/Valkey) and message queues (RabbitMQ) in data flows
  
  
• Experience with infrastructure as code and DevOps practices (Git, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, etc.)
  
  
• Understanding of Kubernetes-based environments and how DBs interact with containerized workloads
  
  
• Awareness of cost optimization techniques in AWS RDS
  
  
• Comfortable reading Python application code using ORMs (e.g., SQLAlchemy, Django ORM)

• Ability to work alongside developers and speak their language - schema design, migrations, query structure
  
  
• Strong cross-functional collaboration experience with Platform, Backend teams and Staff/Principal Engineers
  
  
• Demonstrated ability to teach, mentor, or run enablement programs internally (e.g., DB best practices, workshops)

Nice to Have / Differentiators

• Experience defining data governance, versioning, or lifecycle policies
  
  
• Exposure to analytical DBs (e.g., Redshift, ClickHouse, Snowflake)
  
  
• Contributions to open-source PostgreSQL tooling or internal libraries

You share our core values:

💩  No bullshit: we don’t like big egos; we like honesty, transparency & openness. Share your mistakes with us and learn from them!

🎯  Grow & Win: Keep on learning and improving from each other mistakes and by actively searching for ways to keep on developing your skills.

🎠  Have fun: you are not afraid to be yourself, and you love to be surrounded by your awesome colleagues!

Benefits 🎉

• Working in an internationally oriented, fast-growing, certified Great Place to Work! 📌  

• A good salary that grows within the company and your accomplishments

• 28 holidays per year on a full-time basis + a free holiday on/around your birthday 🥳  

• After 3 years of employment, you get a sabbatical of 4 weeks from us

• Keep growing with a study budget of €2000,- per year!

• Stay fit with our office gym

• Pension scheme

• A flexible hybrid working model and a dedicated 500€ budget to set up your home office 🏠

• Access to many discount programs, shop till you drop! 🛍

Please note that we are not able to offer a visa sponsorship for this role.