Principal Data Engineer - Denver, Colorado, United States

About Procare

Our mission is to simplify childcare operations and create meaningful connections by providing technology, expertise, and unparalleled service.

Procare Solutions is the #1 name in childcare software – used by more than 35,000 childcare businesses across the country. For over 30 years, childcare professionals have looked to Procare to provide real-time information for making critical decisions, maintaining compliance with local and state regulations, and adhering to business best practices.

We make childcare management run smoothly, so that our customers can spend more time focusing on the kiddos, not back office administrative duties.

A little about the role…

As a Principal Database Engineer for the Procare Platform team, you will be pivotal in building, scaling, securing, and optimizing our industry-leading SaaS solutions. With a focus on our production AWS Aurora Postgres instances, you will work alongside Platform, Security, and Application engineers to maintain and enhance our database systems. Your expertise will be crucial in breaking down complex problems and leading the execution of solutions that ensure scalability and reliability of our database architecture.

What You’ll Do

• Manage, scale, and secure AWS Aurora Postgres instances to ensure high performance and availability for our SaaS platform
• Develop strategies for database scaling that are in line with business requirements, focusing on optimizing read/write performance and efficient data access patterns
• Implement monitoring frameworks to capture and analyze database performance metrics that inform continuous improvement cycles
• Work closely with Application Engineers, especially within Ruby on Rails environments, to optimize interactions and scaling of ActiveRecord with Postgres
• Partner with teams across the organizations to drive performance, security, scalability, availability, reliability, observability for relational databases
• Design frameworks and maintain the general ecosystem around relational databases, including schema management, monitoring, permissions, service discovery integration, and more
• Design, automate, and document database operations
• Diagnose and effectively communicate the root cause of database issues
• Apply inspection/debugging techniques to metrics/telemetry, logs, events, and other information sources to diagnose operational issues
• Participate in incident response activities
• Document and present incident postmortems
• Serve on an on-call rotation to address high-priority issues as they arise

Requirements

Our Ideal Candidate Will Have…

• BA/BS degree in Computer Science or a related field
• Minimum of 5 years' experience in data engineering, with substantial experience as a DBA for large-scale user-facing applications backed by Postgres.
• In-depth knowledge of managing and scaling AWS Aurora Postgres instances
• Experience with Ruby/Rails, specifically in optimizing and scaling ActiveRecord and Postgres interactions
• Experience with Cloud-native data stores: DynamoDB, Redis, etc.
• Experience with Data streaming and event-driven models like Kafka
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work as part of a dynamic engineering team
• Strong communication skills and experience in agile project environments
• AWS Certified Database Associate or Higher

Benefits

Why Procare?

• Excellent comprehensive benefits packages including: medical, dental, & vision plans- choose the plan best for you
• HSA option with employer contributions of $50/month
• Vacation time, holidays, sick days, volunteer & personal days
• 401K Plan with employer match and immediate vesting
• Medical, Dependent Care, and Transportation FSA Plans
• Paid Parental Leave
• Company paid Short and Long-Term disability and Life Insurance
• RTD EcoPass for all Denver employees
• Tuition Reimbursement up to $2,000/year and continued Professional Development
• Free access to our Employee Assistance Program with 24/7 live support
• Casual workplace environment
• Some meals provided
• Voluntary Pet Insurance
• Prime downtown location close to restaurants and entertainment
• Promote from within- excellent career paths

Salary

$160,000 to $185,000/year DOE

Location

We are currently in a hybrid in-office/remote working model based on business needs. While our preference is a candidate located in Denver, CO, this role is open to remote candidates in the following states: AL, AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, IA, KY, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, MO, NV, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OR, PA, TN, TX, VA, WA, WI.