Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-hitting Database Lead role sitting right at the intersection of high-performance OLTP systems and modern cloud data warehousing. You will be expected to own both the real-time operational database performance and the analytical pipelines that feed the enterprise. If you enjoy untangling messy distributed architectures and tuning queries until they drop to single-digit milliseconds, this is worth your time.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You'll spend your days balancing deep technical execution with team leadership and stakeholder management. Half the time you'll be knee-deep in AWS Aurora PostgreSQL optimization, fixing replication lags, and designing resilient cloud data models. The other half will involve driving cloud migrations, orchestrating complex ELT pipelines via Talend or Python, and keeping enterprise analytics platforms on Snowflake running smoothly without blowing up the cloud budget.
The Core Tech Stack
You need absolute fluency in AWS Aurora PostgreSQL and Snowflake, as these form the bedrock of the entire data ecosystem. Beyond that, deep hands-on experience with Talend for ETL orchestration, Python for pipeline scripting, and cloud tooling like AWS EMR are non-negotiable. The team also relies heavily on observability tools like Splunk and Dynatrace to monitor production health, so knowing your way around distributed logging and metrics will save you hours of debugging pain.
Interview Expectations
Expect them to grill you on real-world failure modes, specifically asking how you would diagnose and resolve a sudden spike in query latency on a high-throughput OLTP database running in AWS Aurora PostgreSQL. The hiring manager isn't just looking for a textbook answer about indexing; they want to see your systematic approach to checking execution plans, lock contention, and connection pooling under extreme load. You should also be ready to explain a time you architected a zero-downtime migration to the cloud and how you managed stakeholder expectations when things inevitably went sideways.
Application Advice
To get past the ATS and grab the recruiter's attention, make sure your resume explicitly calls out your years of experience with both AWS Aurora PostgreSQL and Snowflake, rather than just listing them as buzzwords. Highlight specific metrics around performance tuning—don't just say you optimized queries, state that you reduced response times from seconds to milliseconds. Weave in your leadership and mentoring background organically, emphasizing how you've driven technical strategy and partnered with business stakeholders to deliver enterprise-grade data solutions.