Senior Platform Engineer, Database Specialist

The Company

The Kantata Cloud for Professional Services gives businesses the clarity, control, and confidence they need to optimize resource planning and elevate operational performance. Our purpose-built software is helping over 2,500 professional services organizations in more than 100 countries focus on and optimize their most important asset: their people. By leveraging Kantata, professionals gain access to the information and tools they need to win more business, ensure the right people are always available at the right time, and delight clients with exceptional project delivery and outcomes.

Kantata is well-capitalized, hiring, and growing our loyal and diversified customer base faster than we ever have. Most importantly, we have a clear vision of where were going and how to get there. (Hint: It involves you.) Did we mention that Kantata is also an awesome place to work? Youll have the opportunity to work in a dynamic environment with a team that loves what they do. A talented team, great perks, and an amazing culture = an employee-rated Best Place to Work!

Senior Platform Engineer, Database Specialist

Primary Responsibilities:

• Proactively identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across our core databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL).
• Analyze, test, and optimize complex SQL queries and data access patterns to ensure sub-second response times.
• Design, implement, and manage indexing strategies, including creating necessary indexes and retiring obsolete or redundant ones.
• Establish and maintain caching strategies (e.g., Redis/Valkey, Memcached) to offload database reads and enhance application performance.
• Lead the planning and execution of major database upgrades and migrations, ensuring minimal downtime and data integrity.
• Implement and manage partitioning and sharding strategies for large, high-growth tables to ensure long-term scalability.
• Lead routine database maintenance, including backups, replication setup, and disaster recovery planning and testing.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) configurations (e.g., Terraform) for database provisioning and management.
• Introduce and support frameworks / linters to make it easier for engineers to write performant code.
• Act as a subject matter expert (SME), consulting with engineering teams on data modeling, schema design, and efficient data access patterns.
• Develop automated tooling and monitoring to quickly detect and alert on database performance or health issues.
• Participate in on-call rotation to provide rapid response to critical database incidents.

What You Bring To The Role

• 5+ years of experience in a database-focused role (DBA, Database Engineer, or similar).
• Deep, expert-level proficiency with at least one major relational database (e.g., PostgreSQL or MySQL) in a high-traffic production environment.
• Demonstrated experience with database performance tuning, advanced query optimization, and execution plan analysis.
• Strong practical experience with database scaling techniques, including replication, sharding, and partitioning.
• Proficiency in a modern programming or scripting language (e.g., Python, Go, or Ruby) for writing database-related tooling, automation, and basic backend integration.
• Experience operating databases within a cloud environment (e.g., AWS RDS, GCP Cloud SQL, Azure Database).

Bonus Points (Preferred Qualifications)

• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Experience with Rails and ActiveRecord.
• A solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps best practices.
• Familiarity with application profiling and tracing tools.