Staff Engineer - Storage & Databases

As our first hire in this domain, you’ll join as a key leader shaping our approach to data infrastructure. Your main responsibility is to build systems that make data storage efficient, scalable, and reliable. Together, we’ll ensure our data storage landscape enables engineers, product teams, and analytics to move quickly and confidently.

What You Will Do

• Collaborate with engineers to review and optimize our current transactional and non-transactional databases, initially focused on our query engine and expanding across modules.
• Design, evaluate, and evolve data storage strategies - including selecting the right storage systems (relational, NoSQL, cloud or on-prem) - to future-proof our infrastructure.
• Architect and maintain scalable, secure, and cost-efficient data storage solutions; introduce best practices, monitoring, and self-serve storage patterns.
• Build and enhance ETL/data pipelines, ensuring they’re performant, reliable, and adaptable for diverse data needs.
• Implement data governance, storage optimization, indexing, partitioning strategies, and access control to uphold performance and compliance.
• Partner with product, analytics, and platform teams to align our technical strategy with business and user needs - anticipating future data demands and enabling self-service data capabilities.

What We Are Looking For

In addition to being a highly experienced technical leader, we’re looking for someone who embraces strategic thinking and cross-functional collaboration:

• 5+ years of engineering experience in data, storage, or platform roles
• Expertise with multiple data storage technologies (not just PostgreSQL and OpenSearch) - including cloud-native, NoSQL, data warehouses or hybrid systems
• Strong skills in data architecture design, performance tuning, indexing, partitioning, and storage optimization
• Hands-on experience designing or improving query engines, ETL pipelines, or data infrastructure
• A platform-oriented mindset - prioritizing self-service, standardization, scalability, and enabling consumers of data
• Excellent communication, product empathy, and ability to work with diverse stakeholders - translating technical considerations into business outcomes

Your Tech Stack

• Proficiency in SQL and one or more programming languages (e.g., Python, Ruby, Kotlin, Java) for scripting and pipeline development
• Familiarity with both transactional and analytical database systems, relational and non-relational stores
• Experience with query engine optimization, indexing, partitioning, distributed storage architectures
• Exposure to cloud infrastructure and tools (AWS, GCP, Azure), orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Kubernetes)
• Understanding of data governance, compliance, and security best practices in storage and pipelines

What Will Make You Stand Out

• Deep experience in self-serve data platforms or Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) focused on data capabilities
• Proven track record of owning data technical strategy and driving long-term storage architecture decisions
• Exposure to emerging paradigms like data mesh, decentralized data architectures, or treating data as a product
• Experience with Streaming and Change Data Capture (CDC) technologies

Our Tech Stack

• Storage & Databases: PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, DuckDB
• Tools & Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka
• Data Platform: Transactional & analytical data systems, internal query engines, evolving storage architectures

You Can Look Forward to the Following Benefits

• Stock options
• MacBook + 34″ monitor
• Budget for online courses, books, and conferences
• 5 weeks of vacation + sick days
• 1 Volunteer Day per year for you to help causes close to your heart
• Carrot Fertility Benefits
• Free snacks, drinks, and yummy catered lunches
• MultiSport card to access sports facilities
• Flexible working hours and home office
• Parental benefits
• Language lessons
• Mental Wellness Program to support your well-being and self-care
• Hone – Live, interactive learning programs for managers, leaders, and teams

About Productboard

• Join at the golden startup age - established stability of a Unicorn with space for individual impact
• You’ll enjoy an exciting team atmosphere, building a whole new category of software
• You can help change the way that products are built all over the world
• We iterate quickly and decisions are fast. You’ll have a voice in what we do and see the impact of your work
• We are backed by top Silicon Valley investors, giving us access to capital, networks, mentors, and new markets
• We are recognized as one of the hottest tech startups on the market today, named by Forbes magazine and Business Insider as one of the best startup employers to bet your career on and are regularly recognized for our company culture

About Our Culture

• People feel empowered, supported, and included
• Trust and transparency are built into the way we work
• Creativity, curiosity, and continuous improvement are encouraged and nurtured every day

Equal Opportunity Employer Statement