Key skills
PythonAIData EngineeringAWSEC2S3RDSIAMPostgresDatadogLeadershipCommunicationCollaboration
About this role
Upstart is a leading AI lending marketplace focused on reducing the cost and complexity of borrowing for Americans. They are seeking a Senior Manager for Database Engineering to lead a team responsible for the reliability, performance, and scalability of their database systems, while also defining long-term strategies and collaborating across teams.
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:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics, or a related field (or its equivalent) + 8 years of experience, including at least 3 years of direct people management experience
- 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