Senior Database Engineer

Why This Role Matters
The Senior Database Engineer at Bluestaq owns the data systems that move and protect information behind national security decisions — the schemas, pipelines, and datastores our enterprise platform runs on. This is not a ticket-closing seat. You are the go-to engineer for a data domain: you design the schemas, tune the queries that are actually slow, keep the pipelines healthy, and lead the medium-sized data work from requirements through production. You operate independently, call out risk before it becomes an outage, and set the bar for the engineers around you.

What You Own 

• Own sets of tables, schemas, and data flows end-to-end within a larger product or program — including their data quality, performance, and operability over time. 
• Design robust relational schemas and data models with sound normalization and denormalization tradeoffs, DDL, and extensive SQL. 
• Work across SQL and NoSQL datastores (MongoDB, Postgres/RDS, Amazon Athena) following best practices, and represent practical DB constraints in data modeling discussions. 
• Lead the design and delivery of medium-sized data features — new domains, new ingest, or significant schema changes. 
• Build moderately complex ETL/ingest pipelines with incremental loads, error handling, and validation. 
• Investigate and fix non-trivial performance problems — bad query plans, missing indexes, partitioning, table bloat — and tune queries, indexes, and configurations for real workloads. 
• Apply database-level security controls — row-level security (e.g., Postgres RLS), roles and permissions, and auditing patterns — to protect sensitive data. 
• Plan and execute database upgrades, patches, and migrations with minimal disruption to dependent systems. 
• Serve as the escalation point for Associate and mid-level engineers on data correctness and performance, and mentor through code review and by explaining design choices. 
• Partner with Software Engineering, Data Modeling, Systems, and Cyber to align data design, performance, and access patterns with mission needs. 
• Keep database and process documentation current — schema and data-flow diagrams, runbooks, and how-to guides for operating and querying key datasets. 

What You Bring 

Required Education & Experience 

• High School Diploma/GED and 8+ years of relevant experience, OR 
• Associate degree in a related field and 6+ years of relevant experience, OR 
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field and 4+ years of relevant experience, OR 
• Master's degree in a related field and 2+ years of relevant experience 

Must-Haves 

• Relational database mastery — production experience designing, tuning, and operating one or more of Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server. 
• NoSQL / large-scale stores — hands-on work with MongoDB, Athena, or equivalent, and sound judgment on when to use them. 
• Schema and data modeling — designing normalized and denormalized structures that hold up under real-world query and storage conditions. 
• Performance engineering — diagnosing bad plans and bottlenecks, and applying indexing, partitioning, and query rewrites that stick. 
• ETL / ingest pipelines — building moderately complex loads with incremental processing, error handling, and validation. 
• Database security — row-level security, roles and permissions, and auditing patterns applied in production. 
• Backup, recovery, and disaster recovery — you know the plan and have exercised it. 
• Linux environments and scripting / automation — PowerShell, Bash, Python, and SQL. 
• SQL depth — Common Table Expressions, dynamic SQL, and the ability to reason about complex queries. 
• Independent delivery — you scope the work, choose the approach, surface risk, and drive it from design through rollout without being managed through it. 
• Mentorship and communication — you raise the bar through code review and clear technical writing for peers, leadership, and cross-functional teams. 
• Ownership mentality — you follow through, document your work, check downstream impact, and know when to persevere vs. ask for help. 

Nice-to-Haves 

• Relevant certifications (e.g., DBA certifications). 
• Cloud platforms — AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. 
• Containerization — Docker, Kubernetes. 
• Schema automation / migration tooling — Liquibase, Flyway. 
• Monitoring and observability — Splunk or equivalent. 
• DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines.