Founding Database Engineer (Equity Only / Part Time) — Really Global

Really Global is building a global, provider-centric mental health marketplace aimed at improving access to mental health care. The role involves owning and refining the database of this platform, ensuring compliance with regulations while enhancing its structure and security.

Responsibilities:

• Schema audit and cleanup. Walk the existing schema end to end. Rename bad columns, fix inconsistent types, add missing constraints (NOT NULL, FK, CHECK), kill dead tables, fix denormalization debt. Document what's there and why
• Safe, reversible migrations. Every structural change ships as a reviewed migration with a rollback path. No ad-hoc ALTER TABLEs in production. No exceptions
• HIPAA-grade access controls. Row-level security, role separation, audit logging, least-privilege roles for every service and human. No more shared superuser access
• GDPR data workflows. Data subject access, right-to-erasure, regional handling, retention policies — implemented in the database, not bolted on top
• Developer gating. PR-based migrations only. Change review process. Gated writes. The database stops being a free-for-all
• Backups, recovery, runbooks. Point-in-time recovery tested, not assumed. Disaster recovery documented. Runbooks for the incidents that actually happen
• Performance. Index strategy, slow-query triage, query review for anything touching hot paths. Real telemetry, not guesses
• The database standards doc. The thing every future contributor reads before they touch data. Written by you. Enforced by you

Requirements:

• Hands-on, today. Not five years ago. Not through a team you manage. You're personally writing SQL, authoring migrations, tuning queries, and reviewing schemas right now
• Postgres-fluent. You know the quirks — MVCC, bloat, vacuum, lock contention, index types, partial indexes, EXPLAIN plans
• Refactor-first. You've inherited a messy schema before and know how to clean it up without downtime or data loss. Reversible migrations are muscle memory
• Security and compliance as instinct. HIPAA, GDPR, PHI, row-level security, audit logging, least privilege — you think about these before anyone asks
• Strong opinions, held loosely. You have views on naming conventions, constraint design, and migration workflow. You can defend them, and you can change your mind when someone presents better data
• Clear, candid communicator. You push back on developers who want to bypass the database, and you do it without drama. You can explain a slow query to a non-technical founder and a HIPAA requirement to an impatient engineer
• AI-native workflow. You orchestrate your own work with tools like Claude or Codex — not because it's trendy, but because anything else is slower