Database Platform Tech Lead

Please note that these positions are based in London, Berlin, or Paris — relocation support is provided if required.

THE BEST WORK OF YOUR CAREER
Trade Republic is the largest savings platform in Europe — we operate in 18 countries, serving +10 million customers who trust us with over €150B in assets. But we're striving for more.

We have a bold mission to empower everyone to build wealth with easy, safe, and free access to financial systems. You will have the opportunity to grow your career by collaborating with a team of outstanding talents and state of the art technology to build a lasting, positive future for millions.

ABOUT PLATFORM ENGINEERING
Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic's engineering velocity. Our mission is to build scalable platforms for a Europe-scale bank — serving internal engineers, and building in-house control planes for managing the bank's infrastructure. We’re a ~50-person Platform team focused on one thing: enabling product engineers to move fast and operate autonomously by default.

We build self-service platforms, golden paths, and opinionated tooling so that over 300 engineers can ship with confidence. From Kubernetes fleet management and CI/CD to an internal Developer Hub built on Backstage, our work underpins every trade, savings plan, and card payment that flows through the platform.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING
Our database platform is foundational to how Trade Republic works — every trade, savings plan, and card payment touches it. As Database Platform Tech Lead, you will set the direction, own the outcomes, and guide the team building the platform layer that makes database operations self-service, automated, and reliable at scale.

• Set the database reliability standard: Architect the failover mechanisms, replication topology, and recovery strategies that meet our availability targets — and own the engineering roadmap that closes the gap between where we are and the number of 9s the business requires.
• Drive toward zero-touch operations: Define what fully automated database operations look like — provisioning and scaling to zero-downtime migrations — and lead the platform work that gets us there.
• Own the database technology strategy: Define which database technology fits which problem — set the criteria for adoption, govern the portfolio, and ensure every database choice is intentional and operated with the same level of rigour.
• Define the database contract with product teams: Set the standards for how product engineers interact with databases — schema governance, migration patterns, connection pooling, query performance — and build the tooling that makes it effortless to get right.
• Own the platform end to end: Set the operational bar — define on-call practices and incident response standards for database failures, and hold the team to them.
• Own the direction and drive it forward: Define the long-term database platform strategy, drive cross-team initiatives from kickoff to delivery, and align database infrastructure decisions with broader engineering, compliance, and cost goals.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 5+ years of experience in database engineering, platform engineering, or a related systems discipline, with a track record of technical leadership.
• Deep, hands-on PostgreSQL expertise: strong opinions on replication, sharding, backup strategies, upgrades, and security. Hands-on experience with Postgres automation and lifecycle tooling is required.
• Familiarity with ClickHouse and Cassandra/Scylla in production environments.
• Solid backend engineering background — Go is preferred but any strong language is welcome; familiarity with Kotlin/JVM is a plus as you'll work directly with product teams who rely on it.
• A track record of turning database best practices into opinionated standards that engineering teams actually adopt.
• Cloud-native in your DNA: hands-on with Kubernetes and IaC tooling, running production workloads on AWS or equivalent.
• Proven ability to define technical strategy, drive cross-team initiatives end-to-end, and hold yourself and others accountable to outcomes.
• Ability to contribute to architectural decisions and clearly communicate trade-offs to both engineers and leadership.
• The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2-3 days a week in the office.

WHY YOU SHOULD APPLY NOW
Our culture rewards ownership, excellence, and high energy. We care deeply about outcomes and hold each other accountable — we're here to win and fix one of the largest challenges Europeans face — closing the pension gap and democratising wealth. If this gets you fired up, reach out!