Senior Manager, Database Engineering

Upstart is a leading AI lending marketplace focused on reducing borrowing costs and complexity for Americans. The Senior Manager, Database Engineering will lead a team responsible for the reliability and scalability of the database systems that power Upstart's lending platform, while partnering with various teams to set standards and solve complex challenges.

Responsibilities:

• Define the roadmap for database engineering, ensuring our database infrastructure scales with Upstart’s growth
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Database Engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and collaboration
• Partner with application and data engineering teams to establish standards for database design, schema governance, and query optimization
• Drive initiatives to improve availability, security, and performance across all production and non-production database environments
• Champion automation and tooling that reduce operational overhead, increase observability, and improve developer self-service
• Act as a thought partner to engineering leadership on database strategy, scaling, and cost efficiency

Requirements:

• 3+ years of people and team management experience, and 8+ years of experience in database engineering or DBA roles
• Deep expertise in Postgres, including extensions, performance tuning, and replication
• Experience designing and supporting high-volume OLTP systems
• Strong background with AWS (RDS, EC2, IAM, VPC, S3) and infrastructure automation
• Proficiency with Python or another scripting language for database automation and tooling
• Strong communication skills and proven ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and operations teams
• Experience with Clickhouse, DataDog DBM, or other distributed database technologies
• Familiarity with database scalability solutions in cloud environments
• Experience in financial services, fintech, or other highly regulated industries
• Background managing mission-critical systems with high uptime requirements