Senior Database Architect & Optimization Lead

Role Summary

SpacePointe is hiring a Senior Database Architect & Optimization Lead to own the design, optimization, security, and scalability of our database platforms across multiple regions and product lines. This is a mission-critical leadership role that ensures our systems can support high-volume payments, POS transactions, and commerce workloads with low latency and maximum reliability.

You will define and enforce database design standards, lead performance engineering, architect scaling strategies, and provide hands-on expertise in troubleshooting and optimization. You will also be the escalation point for complex partner issues (e.g., InComm, processors, banks) and the technical owner for database-related compliance, security, and capacity planning.

This role is deeply technical and strategic—not project management. You must be able to write queries, tune systems, analyze plans, and architect data platforms while also mentoring engineers and setting standards.

Important: All applicants must answer the screening questions provided in the job application and include their available interview dates/times. Applications without these will not be considered.

Core ResponsibilitiesDatabase Architecture & Standards

• Define and enforce schema design principles (normalization vs denormalization, partitioning, indexing).
• Establish reference architectures and best practices for OLTP systems.
• Provide developers with schema review support, ensuring long-term scalability and consistency.
• Maintain documentation of data models, ERDs, and integration touchpoints.

Performance Engineering

• Profile and eliminate long-running queries, inefficient joins, locks, and hot-spot indexes.
• Establish baseline metrics (p50/p95 query times, DB response latency, transaction throughput).
• Implement performance budgets into CI/CD gates and developer reviews.
• Lead query review processes to embed optimization into development culture.

Platform Stability & Scaling

• Architect and tune databases for high availability: replication, partitioning, clustering, caching, sharding.
• Collaborate with DevOps to optimize PostgreSQL/MySQL instances in Azure, configure replication, backups, and failover strategies.
• Oversee capacity planning: forecast transaction growth, design sharding strategies, evaluate cloud scaling limits.
• Benchmark and adopt new storage/compute patterns (columnar, read replicas, in-memory caching).

Troubleshooting & Partner Support

• Act as tier-3 escalation for DB-related production incidents.
• Partner with external vendors (e.g., InComm, processors, banks) to trace DB-level integration issues.
• Deliver root cause analyses (RCAs) for all DB-related issues, with permanent remediation plans.
• Drive postmortems and prevent regressions.

Security & Compliance

• Implement and monitor access controls, audit trails, encryption at rest/in transit.
• Own database compliance for PCI DSS, GDPR (where applicable), and internal security standards.
• Collaborate with data protection partners on penetration tests and vulnerability remediation.
• Ensure least privilege principles and periodic access audits are enforced.

Leadership & Mentorship

• Mentor DBAs, developers, and engineers on SQL, schema design, and query optimization.
• Champion data literacy across teams: ensure engineers understand tradeoffs of queries, indexes, and transactions.
• Act as the voice of data engineering in cross-functional technical strategy sessions.
• Evangelize performance and reliability as cultural values across engineering.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years working with relational databases at scale, including at least 3+ years in a senior/architect-level role.
• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB internals, optimization, and tuning.
• Advanced proficiency with SQL profiling tools (EXPLAIN/ANALYZE, pg_stat_statements, performance_schema).
• Proven experience architecting high-volume OLTP systems (tens of millions of transactions/month).
• Track record implementing partitioning, replication, clustering, sharding.
• Experience with in-memory caches (Redis, Memcached) and distributed data consistency.
• Demonstrated leadership in incident response, RCA, and postmortem culture.
• Strong background in security and compliance frameworks (PCI DSS required, GDPR a plus).

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience in fintech/payments (POS, ISO 8583, EMV, reconciliation systems).
• Azure cloud DB services (Azure Database for PostgreSQL/MySQL), Terraform automation.
• Familiarity with NoSQL or hybrid systems (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB).
• Exposure to streaming and CDC pipelines (Kafka, Debezium).
• Experience leading multi-region data replication and cross-border data compliance.

Success Metrics (KPIs)Performance Health

• % reduction in slow/long-running queries.
• Median and p95 query execution time improvements.
• Sustained DB response times under peak traffic.

Reliability

• MTTR for database-related incidents.
• SLA/SLO adherence for DB uptime.

Scalability

• Successful growth in transaction throughput without performance degradation.
• Adoption of indexing/sharding/replication strategies in production.

Security & Compliance

• % of DBs aligned with PCI DSS and internal controls.
• Downward trend in vulnerabilities identified in DB security audits.

How We Work

• Hands on keys: senior leadership demonstrated through design, code, and optimization.
• Performance-first culture: measure, test, and enforce performance budgets.
• Blameless postmortems: every outage produces learning and permanent fixes.
• Collaboration at scale: seamless work with Engineering, DevOps, QA, and external partners.

Applications must include:

• Complete answers to the screening questions.
• Your available dates/times for interviews in the next two weeks.

Applications missing screening answers or interview availability will be automatically disqualified.

Job Types: Full-time, Permanent

Pay: E£45,000.00 - E£55,000.00 per month

Application Question(s):

• Deep Performance Tuning (Hands-on)

“Share one production query you personally optimized on PostgreSQL or MySQL. Include: original SQL, table/index DDL (sanitized), EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) plans before/after, the exact changes you made (indexes/rewrites/partitioning/hints/config), and the measurable impact (p50/p95, CPU/IO, lock wait, throughput).”

Attachments required: before/after plans + SQL + DDL (sanitized).

• HA/Scaling Architecture (Design under constraints)

“Design a high-volume OLTP data tier for multi-region payments/POS on Azure using PostgreSQL or MySQL. State assumptions and target SLOs, then detail: replication strategy, partitioning/sharding approach, failover, backups, RPO/RTO, read/write routing, cache strategy (e.g., Redis), and how you’ll enforce performance budgets in CI/CD. Call out trade-offs and limits (e.g., hot partitions, cross-region latency).”

Deliverable: 1–2 page diagram/brief or bullets

• Security, Compliance & Incident Ownership (RCA depth)

“Describe a real DB-related incident you led end-to-end (e.g., lock cascade, replica lag, index bloat, deadlocks, audit finding). Provide a blameless RCA summary covering: detection signals, scope/impact, root cause, contributing factors, PCI-relevant controls (access, encryption, auditing), permanent fix, and the guardrails you added (monitoring, alerts, least-privilege, change gates).”

Deliverable: RCA summary + example alert/metric queries (sanitized).