Senior Database Engineer

About the role

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.