About the Role
We are looking for a builder — someone who thinks in schemas, reasons in execution plans, and treats a stored procedure like production code. This is not a consulting role, not an advisory role, and not a title-without-scope role. You will own the database-first backend of a transactional platform end to end: schema design, stored procedure engineering, performance tuning, API contracts, and production reliability.
If you have called yourself a database engineer, a backend architect, a platform engineer with deep SQL roots, or a principal engineer who has lived inside PostgreSQL (or a comparable RDBMS) — this role is for you. You will set the engineering standards, mentor the team, and be the last line of defence on correctness and reliability for a data-critical system.
This role is based on-site in Kolkata. We are looking for engineers already here or genuinely committed to relocating.
What You Will Own
1. Database Architecture & Schema Design
- Own the end-to-end schema for a transactional relational system — normalisation, referential integrity, partitioning strategy, and long-term evolvability.
- Define and enforce engineering standards for SQL: naming conventions, indexing policies, constraint discipline, and change governance.
- Establish versioned, sequenced database change management — with rollback strategies and deployment safety gates.
- Lead design reviews and be the escalation point for complex data modelling and concurrency decisions.
2. Stored Procedure & Transactional Logic Engineering
- Design and implement stored procedures and functions that encapsulate core business and transactional logic — not one-offs, but reusable, testable, auditable patterns.
- Define the standard: parameterisation, input validation, error handling, deterministic outputs, and audit hooks.
- Build a disciplined test harness for database routines: golden datasets, regression suites, boundary condition coverage, and restore drills.
- Own performance engineering for procedure execution: query plan governance, statistics maintenance, concurrency controls, and deadlock prevention.
3. Backend API & Orchestration Layer
- Build and review backend services that expose database routines via clean, well-contracted APIs — request validation, execution, response mapping, and error modelling.
- Define runtime resilience patterns: idempotency, retries, timeouts, backpressure, and safe configuration/secrets handling.
- Ensure least-privilege database access and enforce security standards across the API surface.
- Design for pagination, rate limiting, and observable SLAs — not just happy-path correctness.
4. Reliability, Observability & Incident Response
- Drive backup, restore, and recovery drills. Define RTO/RPO expectations and verify them — not just document them.
- Partner with platform/DevOps on monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and incident playbooks.
- Lead root cause analysis for incidents and degradations; implement durable preventative fixes, not patches.
- Build observability into the system from the start: structured logs, correlation IDs, query metrics, and dashboards.
Skills & Experience
Must Have
- Advanced SQL- Complex joins, window functions, CTEs, set operations, concurrency control. You write and read execution plans, not just queries.
- Stored Procedures / Functions - Deep, hands-on authorship of stored procedures and functions encapsulating real business logic — not wrappers. You own the pattern, not just individual routines.
- RDBMS Internals- ACID guarantees, isolation levels, locking and deadlock diagnosis, indexing strategies, statistics, and query planner behaviour. PostgreSQL strongly preferred; other platforms considered for exceptional candidates.
- Schema & Data Modelling - Designing normalised, evolvable schemas for transactional systems. Constraint discipline, referential integrity, and partitioning strategy.
- Backend API Design - Building and reviewing API layers over database routines: error modelling, idempotency, pagination, rate limiting. Language-agnostic — the design matters more than the stack.
- Technical Leadership - Architecture ownership, engineering standard-setting, mentoring, and pragmatic trade-off reasoning with clear written justification.
Good to Have
- Experience with a managed relational database service (AWS Aurora/RDS, Azure SQL, Cloud SQL) — operational tuning, not just provisioning.
- Hands-on use of database change management tooling: Flyway, Liquibase, or equivalent, including stored procedure versioning.
- Observability discipline: structured logging, correlation ID propagation, metrics, dashboards, and alert tuning.
- Experience managing golden dataset suites and expected-result evolution as systems and schemas change over time.
Bonus (Not Required)
- Familiarity with event-driven or serverless patterns that complement database workflows (queues, CDC, outbox pattern).
- Experience standardising SQL and stored-procedure engineering across teams — templates, linters, performance checklists.
- Exposure to security and compliance requirements: audit logs, access segregation, column-level encryption, secrets management.
- Experience in finance, logistics, compliance, or other domains where data correctness is non-negotiable.
Who Should Apply
Apply if you are:
- A principal or staff engineer who has designed and operated a database-centric backend system with genuine end-to-end ownership — not just reviewed others schemas.
- Someone who has written stored procedures or database functions as the primary author for production business logic, and built the testing discipline around them.
- An engineer who can read a query execution plan, diagnose a locking issue, and explain the trade-off between a partial index and a covering index — without looking it up.
- A technical leader who has set engineering standards, run design reviews, and mentored engineers — not just contributed individually.
- Based in Kolkata, or ready to relocate here. On-site, full-time. We want people who are committed to being in the room.
This is not the right role if:
- Your SQL expertise is primarily application-layer ORM usage with limited direct schema or stored-procedure ownership.
- You have not been the primary architect on a production transactional database system — as opposed to a contributor or reviewer.
- Your backend experience is predominantly stateless microservices with thin database layers and no performance or reliability ownership.
- You are open to Kolkata but not actively committed — we are not the right fit for a tentative relocation.
Experience & Qualifications
- 10–15+ years of overall engineering experience with a demonstrable record of principal-level impact.
- Strong Python scripting is mandatory — you will be assessed on actual code during the interview process.
- Expert-level SQL — you will be assessed on actual query writing, schema design, and execution plan analysis during the interview process.
- B.E. / B.Tech / M.Tech in Computer Science, IT, or equivalent practical experience.
- Based in Kolkata or willing to relocate. This role is on-site, full-time.
