Senior Database Engineer

New York City or Remote     ·    Full time

Beacon Biosignals is seeking a Database Engineer to help us build the Beacon Platform Datastore, a data layer at the core of our platform to accelerate precision medicine for millions of patients with severe neurological and psychiatric disease. The Beacon Platform Datastore facilitates both transactional and analytical access patterns for all persistent state relevant to Beacon, including biosignal recording/annotation data, application state for Platform-powered applications, numerical features/analysis results, and more.

PostgreSQL is a core underlying component of the Datastore, so if you’re looking for a job where you can leverage your PostgreSQL skills daily, this role should be ideal!

As a Database Engineer, you’ll work directly with the rest of the Beacon Platform team to…

• …schematically model our business/scientific domains with high fidelity and integrity.
• …implement and maintain a robust data warehousing solution to power the core of Beacon’s Platform for biosignal analysis at scale.
• …ensure a high-quality user experience for downstream data consumers at Beacon.
• …build tools and automate CI/CD processes that make Datastore development ergonomic, iterative, and fun.

At Beacon, we believe a diverse team builds more robust systems and achieves higher impact. We encourage people from all backgrounds to apply!

About You

• You prefer open-source dependencies to closed-source dependencies because you have a compulsion to read the code that you’re running. You’re deeply engaged with the OSS communities that drive the PostgreSQL ecosystem.
• You have effective, battle-tested patterns that enable performant, ergonomic, and robust access control in PostgreSQL via RLS.
• 3NF is generally table stakes for any relational schema you design.
• You’re keen on a database-first development approach that avoids impedance-mismatched abstraction layers while composing well with external services and object storage systems.
• You enjoy performance tuning SQL queries/procedures and exploiting schema-wide design patterns that enable high baseline performance for query authors.
• You’ve encountered the myriad idiosyncrasies inherent to storing large volumes of dense artifactual data (e.g. audio, video, domain-specific sensor data, etc.) alongside sparse relational metadata.
• You’re comfortable administrating/scaling PostgreSQL via AWS RDS or an equivalent cloud solution.
• You demonstrate a bias towards simplicity and avoid misallocating complexity.
• You have a knack for catching little errors and inconsistencies.
• You’re excited to leverage your data modeling skills to accelerate biosignal analysis and help patients suffering from neurological conditions.
• You’ve witnessed firsthand how fast a team can move when they’re enabled by first-class CI/CD and tools that aid common DBA tasks like migrations/rollbacks/upgrades, and how much friction poorly designed tools can introduce into the development cycle.
• You strive for excellence with regards to asynchronous communication and developer collaboration skills. You review PRs with attention to detail and empathy, you’re a fan of pair programming, you write a lot (and with care), and you read even more than you write.
• You’re familiar with and/or are excited to work with the technologies that power Beacon’s data systems, including GraphQL, PostGraphile, Docker, K8s, Julia, Arrow, Metabase, Argo, and GitHub Actions.

Beacon Biosignals is an equal opportunity employer; we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.