Senior Database Design Engineer

QuidelOrtho is a leading in vitro diagnostics company formed by the merger of Quidel Corporation and Ortho Clinical Diagnostics. They are seeking a Senior Database Design Engineer to serve as the subject matter expert for relational database design and tuning for Linux-based medical devices, ensuring long-term maintainability and regulatory compliance throughout the product lifecycle.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as the database architecture owner for PostgreSQL or equivalent database instances embedded within medical devices running Linux on workstation-class hardware
• Design relational schemas, views, indexes, and constraints that balance performance, maintainability, and regulatory traceability
• Own and maintain the database design over time, including governance of schema changes, technical debt management, documentation, and coordination of design evolution across releases
• Act as the central design authority for how multiple software components read from and write to shared database resources
• Design database interfaces and usage patterns that minimize the need for future migrations, while still enabling safe, versioned evolution when required
• Lead query optimization and performance tuning, including execution plan analysis, indexing strategy, and long-term capacity planning
• Define standards for database versioning, migration strategy, and backward compatibility suitable for regulated, fielded systems
• Collaborate with system architects, middleware developers, and UI teams to ensure database access patterns are well-defined, testable, and stable
• Provide technical leadership in design reviews related to data modeling, persistence strategy, and cross-process communication via the database
• Support backup, restore, and recovery strategies appropriate for on-device databases in production medical equipment
• Participate in requirements, architecture, design, verification, and validation activities within a regulated quality management system (FDA, IEC 62304, ISO 13485)
• Perform other work-related duties as assigned

Requirements:

• B.S. or M.S. Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related discipline required
• Minimum of 5 years required with bachelor's or 3 years with master's degree, preferably leading in a medical device environment or equivalent combination of education and experience
• Demonstrated expertise in designing and evolving relational schemas; optimizing queries through execution plan analysis; and defining indexing, view, and data-access layers that support multiple consumers
• Experience supporting on-device or embedded databases, where the database runs locally on a deployed system rather than as a managed cloud service
• Strong understanding of data evolution strategies, including migrations, versioned schemas, and backward compatibility
• Experience working in regulated or safety-critical environments (medical devices strongly preferred)
• Working knowledge of C++ or similar programming language sufficient to collaborate with application developers and review database interaction code
• Strong analytical skills and ability to reason about system-wide performance and data integrity tradeoffs
• Ability to travel 5% or less, domestically
• Experience tuning databases for non-cloud, appliance-style deployments
• Familiarity with Linux-based embedded or semi-embedded systems (Yocto, Ubuntu, or similar)
• Experience designing database schemas that support concurrent access by multiple services or processes
• Knowledge of database migration tools and strategies suitable for deployed products with limited upgrade windows
• Prior experience executing database migrations (including planning, risk mitigation, validation, and rollback) and applying lessons learned to improve future migration practices
• Familiarity with scripting or automation (SQL, Python, Bash) for diagnostics, profiling, and maintenance tooling
• Understanding of observability concerns related to databases (logging, metrics, tracing)
• Experience collaborating across software, systems, quality, and regulatory teams