Senior Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure (RDBMS)

The Data Platform team builds and owns highly available, scalable data infrastructure for TRM's products and services. As a Senior Software Engineer on Data Infrastructure (RDBMS), you will develop, operate, and scale the relational database systems that serve data at petabyte scale, helping build a safer financial system for billions of people. This role is uniquely broad at TRM: you own the serving layer end to end, from query performance to cost to availability, on infrastructure that product teams depend on every day.

The impact you will have:

• Keep customer-facing APIs fast and available at five-nines by owning query tuning, index design, and schema optimization on petabyte-scale Postgres/Citus, directly determining whether product teams can serve data in real time

• Cut storage and compute costs materially by using AI-assisted analysis (pganalyze paired with Claude) to detect compression and data-model opportunities, then shipping validated changes to production

• Remove team toil by building agentic automation for routine database operations, such as self-serve pgbouncer provisioning, disk scaling, and blue-green deployments, so any engineer can run them safely

• Protect data integrity and latency by driving agentic validation of database changes before they reach production

• Keep real-time data flowing by managing CDC pipelines (PeerDB, Fivetran, Debezium) and using AI tooling to debug replication failures faster

• Shape the next-generation platform by migrating workloads off first-gen infrastructure and prototyping new data stores with AI-accelerated spikes

• Raise the whole team's leverage by codifying your workflows into AI-native runbooks and internal tooling that teammates reuse

What we're looking for:

• 5–8 years building and operating production PostgreSQL (Citus, Aurora, AlloyDB, or equivalent distributed Postgres)

• Deep SQL optimization skills (Explain Plans, CTEs, window functions, partitioning, index design, query-planner behavior in distributed environments), increasingly paired with AI-assisted query analysis

• Hands-on experience with CDC tools (PeerDB, Fivetran, Debezium, Datastream, Airbyte) and comfort using AI tooling to debug replication failure modes

• Fluency with database profiling (pganalyze or equivalent) to interpret metrics and logs, including using LLMs to summarize performance findings

• Production automation experience in Python or Go, including agentic automation of routine database tasks; Postgres extension development is a plus

• Daily use of AI coding tools (Claude, Copilot) to accelerate development and produce higher-quality output faster, with the judgment to know when to trust or reject AI output

• A track record of using AI-assisted analysis to drive measurable cost or performance improvements in production database systems

About the Team:

• The Data Platform team is distributed, not distant. We operate async-first across US and Canada working hours with intentional synchronous touchpoints when speed demands it

• We own the petabyte-scale data infrastructure that powers TRM's products. The scope is large, the mission is real, and the work is technically demanding

• Team culture is product-focused, customer-focused, coaching-oriented, scrappy when needed, and process-oriented when executing against OKRs

• You will work alongside senior engineers who care deeply about their craft and hold high standards for code quality, operational excellence, and cross-team communication

Team Operating Rhythms:

• Distributed, not distant: most collaboration happens async in Slack, Notion, and GitHub, and meetings are purposeful and minimal

• Primary timezone overlap across US and Canada working hours; our north star is no IC spending more than 3–4 hours per week in meetings

• Written-first culture: technical specs and decision docs drive alignment before code

On Call Requirements:

• ⚠️ On Call Requirements — Pending Regional Compliance Review. This role carries an on-call rotation (approximately once every 15 days; each shift is a 24-hour window across 2 days). On-call is clear to proceed for United States; the Canada portion requires People Ops / Deel provincial confirmation before this section is finalized and posted. See the On-Call Compliance note in the Post-Fill Summary.

Learn about TRM Speed in this position:

• Within 30 days, eliminate a single point of failure by shipping self-serve scaling automation (pgbouncer provisioning, disk resizing) that any teammate can run, freeing senior engineering time

• Within the first quarter, identify a compression opportunity with AI-assisted analysis, validate it with a proof of concept, and ship it to production for a measurable storage-cost reduction with zero availability impact

• Within 90 days, coordinate a schema change across three product-engineering teams in parallel and deliver the platform changes ahead of a product deadline so a customer feature ships on time

The following represents the expected range of compensation for this role:

• Individual pay is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. The compensation details listed in this posting reflect the US base salary only.

• The estimated base salary range for this role is $200,000 - $220,000

• Additionally, this role may be eligible to participate in TRM’s equity plan.

• Please note – we factor in the different costs for geographies outside the United States.

• Recruiter Intro: Explore your experience, motivations, and alignment with the role.

Learn more about interviewing at TRM

At TRM, you should expect:

• Priorities and targets to change quickly as we experiment and iterate

• Close collaboration across teams and functions

• Frequent, high-touch communication

• Creative problem solving and out-of-the-box thinking

• Accelerate repeatable workflows

• Structure and solve problems

• Improve output quality

• Increase speed and leverage

• Impact-Oriented Trailblazer: We put customers first and move with speed, focus, and adaptability. We treat every plan like an experiment – test, ship, measure, and iterate quickly.