The Role
Own the performance, reliability, and scalability of PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Redis, and related platform datastores. Diagnose locking, pooling, query, and load issues; lead capacity planning and load testing; establish schema and migration standards; build monitoring, alerts, and runbooks; support replication and recovery; and mentor product engineers on data-intensive systems.
Summary Generated by Built In
About Rootly
About the Role
What You'll Do
What You'll Need
Minimum Qualifications
Preferred Qualifications
What Success Looks Like
Our Tech Stack
Why Rootly?
At Rootly, we are on a mission to be the go-to way companies respond when things go wrong, helping every organization be more reliable. We do this by building an industry-leading incident management platform that allows companies around the world to consistently and quickly resolve incidents. We are not simply transforming an industry, we are carving out a new multi-billion-dollar category ourselves and need incredible talent to achieve this ambitious goal together.
Customers love Rootly. Some of the fastest-growing companies around the world such as NVIDIA, DoorDash, Uber, Canva, Tripadvisor, Squarespace and more rely on Rootly to power their critical incident management process. They obsess over our delightful enterprise-ready platform and unique partnership model. See why our customers have reviewed us 5 stars on G2.
Investors love Rootly. We are backed by some of the most respected funds in the world from Y Combinator to operators like the CTO of Dropbox and GitHub. We'd be happy to disclose our entire funding and profitability picture live during the interview. As a culture we relentlessly put transparency first. We conduct monthly financial reviews as a team so everyone has a pulse on the health of the business and publish what we are building in our weekly changelog.
As a Senior Platform Engineer focused on datastores, you'll be the team's expert on PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Kafka, and Redis. You'll find and fix the locking, pooling, and query problems that can slow Rootly down under load, and you'll raise the whole engineering team's depth through pairing, reviews, and runbooks rather than owning the datastores alone.
Like everyone on Platform, you'll also share responsibility for the platform as a whole and take your turn on call. You'll work closely with our platform engineering leader, and with product engineers to shape how their features store and query data.
- Own the performance and reliability of PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, and Redis in production.
- Find and fix lock contention, connection pooling limits, slow queries, and job fan-out that degrade under load.
- Lead capacity planning and load testing so we know our limits before a customer's worst day finds them.
- Set standards for schema changes, migrations, indexing, and query patterns, and build checks that catch problems before they ship.
- Review data-heavy changes from product teams and teach the patterns behind your feedback.
- Build the dashboards, runbooks, and alerts that let any engineer debug a datastore incident.
- Partner on multi-region data replication and recovery with the Infrastructure side of Platform.
What You'll Need
We care about impact, ownership, and technical judgement. Degrees and big-name logos are not required. What matters is your ability to execute, influence, and teach.
- 5+ years building and running production systems, with significant time on datastore performance and reliability.
- Experience supporting multi-tenant systems at scale, including tenant isolation, noisy-neighbour protection, and keeping one customer's traffic spike from degrading service for everyone else.
- Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals: locking, MVCC, query plans, indexing, vacuum, and connection pooling.
- Experience running OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale.
- Experience with capacity planning and load testing for web services.
- You fix the class of problem, not the instance, and leave behind tools and docs others use.
- You write production-grade software, and you're comfortable working in an application codebase, not only in the database.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Rails, ActiveRecord, and Sidekiq at scale.
- Experience with Redis as a queue and cache under heavy load.
- Experience with cross-region replication and database failover.
- Experience with Kafka or DynamoDB.
What Success Looks Like
By 6 to 12 months you will have:
- Fixed the top locking, pooling, and slow-query issues behind our historical SEV0 incidents.
- Established a load testing baseline and capacity plan, so we know our limits before customers find them.
- Put schema change and migration standards in place, backed by automated checks.
- Built dashboards, runbooks, and alerts that let any engineer on call debug a datastore incident.
- Spread datastore depth across the team, so reliability doesn't depend on any one person.
Our Tech Stack
- Backend: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Redis, Sidekiq, AWS Lambda, ECS, Kafka, DynamoDB
- Frontend: Turbo, Stimulus, ViewComponents
- Infrastructure: AWS, OpenTofu/Terraform (IaC), Datadog
Why Rootly?
We're not just another startup. We're building something category-defining and want teammates who crave ownership, love solving hard problems, and thrive in a high-bar, high-impact environment.
Here's what you can expect when you join Rootly:
- Competitive compensation and early equity in a fast-growing, venture-backed company.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- 3 weeks of vacation, plus unlimited sick and mental health days, and a company-wide end-of-year shutdown to recharge.
- $500 stipend for home office setup.
- Unlimited token usage and access to AI tools.
- A fast-moving, high-impact environment where your leadership and ideas directly shape the future of the company.
This is a newly created vacancy, and we may hire more than one person to fill it.
As we build out the team, we may use AI to support parts of our interview process, like reviewing assessments, but it's a tool that helps our people, not a substitute for their judgement.
If this sounds like the kind of challenge and opportunity you're looking for, apply now and let's build something great together.
Accommodations are available on request at any stage of our recruitment process. Contact [email protected] and we will work with you to meet your needs confidentially.
Rootly is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, record of offences, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by the Ontario Human Rights Code or applicable law.
Skills Required
- 5+ years building and running production systems, including significant datastore performance and reliability experience
- Experience supporting multi-tenant systems at scale, including tenant isolation and noisy-neighbor protection
- Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, including locking, MVCC, query plans, indexing, vacuum, and connection pooling
- Experience running OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale
- Experience with capacity planning and load testing for web services
- Ability to solve systemic problems and create reusable tools and documentation
- Ability to write production-grade software and work in an application codebase
- Experience with Rails, ActiveRecord, and Sidekiq at scale
- Experience with Redis as a queue and cache under heavy load
- Experience with cross-region replication and database failover
- Experience with Kafka or DynamoDB
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The Company
What We Do
Rootly is an incident management platform on Slack that helps automate manual admin work during incidents. Leading companies such as NVIDIA, Squarespace, Canva, Grammarly, OpenSea, Figma, and countless others trust Rootly to build a consistent incident response process. See why they rate us 5 stars on G2: https://www.g2.com/products/rootly-manage-incidents-on-slack/reviews
