Staff Database Reliability Engineer – PostgreSQL

Location: Remote OR Hybrid from Amsterdam

About Stream

Stream powers real-time Chat, Video, Activity Feeds, and AI Moderation for billions of end-users across thousands of apps — from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users, while delivering highly reliable, low-latency services and a great developer experience.

The Role

We're looking for a hands-on Database Engineer to own PostgreSQL as a production system at Stream. You'll work directly with a small, senior team and be responsible for the performance, reliability, and operability of the databases that store and serve data for Stream's entire real-time platform.

This is a deep, hands-on engineering role. You'll spend your time in query plans, storage internals, and the operational realities of running databases under heavy, continuous load — not administering them from a distance.

Why This Role Exists

We have 35-40 different DBs (largest one is 15tb), with large writing throughput. To save hosting costs, we plan on migrating from AWS RDS to self-hosted Postgres on Kubernetes.

For that, we need help from someone who:

What You'll Work On

Performance and internals — diagnose and resolve performance issues from the query down to the storage engine: indexing strategy, query planning, vacuum and bloat management, and tuning under sustained write load.

Reliability and operations — own the operational characteristics of our Postgres fleet, including backup, replication, and high availability as we take on more responsibility for running these systems ourselves.

Scaling the data layer — work on sharding, partitioning, and the architectural decisions that keep the database performant as data and traffic grow.

Beyond that, you'll set standards for how we run Postgres, collaborate closely with application engineers to connect database behaviour to real access patterns, and help shape the long-term direction of our data infrastructure.

Core Technologies

Go · PostgreSQL · CockroachDB · Redis · Kubernetes · AWS

Required

Deep PostgreSQL expertise — you understand the internals (MVCC, vacuum and bloat, the query planner, indexing, replication) well enough to debug hard problems and reason from first principles, not from defaults.

Production ownership at scale — you've run Postgres behind high-traffic services with large datasets and high write throughput, and you've felt and fixed the failure modes that come with that.

Self-managed databases — you've operated Postgres yourself (on Kubernetes, bare-metal, or VMs), owning backup, replication, and high availability. Managed services alone aren't enough background for this role.

Sharding and scaling — you've sharded a real Postgres workload, not only table partitioning.

An engineering mindset — you can read and write code, and you connect database behaviour to application access patterns rather than treating the DB in isolation.

Judgement alongside AI tooling — we use AI heavily in our workflows; you should be able to use it well and know when it's wrong. Deep internals knowledge is what lets you tell the difference.

Strong Plus

Multi-tenant database experience

Experience pushing PostgreSQL beyond conventional relational use (large semi-structured or blob data, flexible query interfaces)

Messaging, social, or other high-write, event-heavy storage backgrounds

Connection pooling, logical replication / CDC, or Postgres-compatible distributed SQL (CockroachDB, Yugabyte)

Open source contributions to database or infrastructure tooling

What We're Not Looking For

Being explicit saves everyone time:

Managed-service-only backgrounds — if your Postgres experience is entirely RDS/Aurora/Cloud SQL with no self-managed ownership, the core of this role will be unfamiliar.

Application developers above the query layer — if you've used Postgres through an ORM but never read a query plan or tuned the database, this isn't the right fit.

DBAs who don't code — administration alone isn't enough; this is an engineering role.

Analytics / data-warehouse specialists — this is high-write transactional (OLTP) Postgres, not Redshift/Snowflake/Spark/ETL work.

AI skepticism — we won't spend time convincing you AI is worth adopting.

Benefits (Netherlands-based employees):

Generous compensation

Company equity

28 days PTO + Dutch public holidays

Pension scheme

Learning & Development budget

Commute reimbursement to Amsterdam or company bike

Fitness stipend

Access to open-source project work

Benefits are adjusted per country of residence for remote hires.

Why Stream?

High scale/ difficult engineering

Default alive. Startup growth opportunity with healthy revenue

Strong engineering culture. Engineering is what makes us succeed

All managers are hands-on and capable engineers

Edge network of servers around the world

Great opportunity to learn and grow

Raised $58M from leading VCs (Felicis Ventures, Notable Capital, 01.Advisors, Techstars, Arthur Ventures), including backers like Dick Costolo (01 Advisors, ex-CEO of Twitter), Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Tom Preston-Werner (Co-Founder of GitHub), Nicolas Dessaigne (Co-Founder of Algolia)

Hybrid office policy: applicants based (or relocating to) one of our office locations are expected to work according to the applicable local office attendance policy.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

Note for external recruiters: We currently have this role covered and do not accept unsolicited agency resumes. We are not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.