Senior Database Engineer

Staff Database Engineer

As a Staff Database Engineer at Clearwater Analytics, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the data platform behind a leading investment management SaaS solution. You will contribute hands‑on to the evolution of a large‑scale SQL Server environment into a modern, cloud‑native AWS ecosystem, creating a secure, scalable, and high‑performing platform for mission‑critical products.

In this role, you will drive database strategy across reliability, performance, automation, and modernization. You’ll work on complex technical challenges that directly impact transaction processing, reporting, and reconciliation services used by clients every day. This is an opportunity to influence long-term architecture, champion engineering best practices, and help define how database platforms operate at scale.

We’re looking for someone who combines deep database expertise with a passion for innovation and continuous improvement. The ideal candidate is a strong technical leader with hands-on SQL Server experience, exposure to modern cloud database technologies, and a track record of solving difficult problems in high-scale, high-availability environments.

If you enjoy building resilient systems, modernizing legacy platforms, and collaborating across engineering teams to deliver meaningful impact, this role offers the chance to do exactly that.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the strategy, architecture, and long-term roadmap for Clearwater’s database platforms across on-premises and cloud environments.
• Lead modernization initiatives, including migration to cloud native or managed database services and adoption of IaC based automation.

• Drive standards for performance optimization, scalability, observability, and governance across all database environments.
• Design and manage sophisticated SQL Server Always On Availability Groups and cross-region disaster recovery (DR) strategies to meet stringent FinTech RPO/RTO requirements.
• Implement and audit data security standards, including Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), AWS IAM database authentication, and encryption at rest/transit to maintain SOC2 and HIPAA compliance.
• Oversee system health, incident response, performance tuning, and real-time monitoring for high-volume, low latency workloads.
• Ensure SLAs, SLOs, RTO/RPO, and compliance requirements are consistently met.
• Streamline deployments, backups, patching, failovers, and capacity scaling through automation.

• Partner with software engineering, SRE, analytics, cloud platform, and security teams to ensure alignment with business and technical objectives.
• Collaborate with stakeholders on prioritization, planning, risk management, and delivery commitments.

• Foster a collaborative, results driven engineering culture consistent with Clearwater values.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in production database engineering, with deep technical expertise in SQL Server (performance tuning, indexing, high availability/disaster recovery, query optimization).

• Hands-on experience with modern cloud database platforms (AWS RDS, Aurora, Azure SQL, or similar).
• Expertise in real-time and batch data processing, pipelines, and modern data architecture.
• Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex locking, blocking, and deadlock issues in environments with massive data sets and high transaction rates.
• Advanced proficiency in PowerShell or Python for automating operational tasks and integrating with CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong experience using Terraform or CloudFormation to manage database infrastructure.
• Strong knowledge of governance, compliance, observability, and cost optimization principles.
• Exceptional communication skills, including clear written, verbal, and incident communications.
• Proven track record of delivering complex technical initiatives under pressure.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in investment accounting, financial reporting, or other highly regulated SaaS environments.
• Experience with Snowflake, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, or other cloud native and nonrelational platforms.
• Experience supporting largescale, high throughput transactional workloads.
• Exposure to data streaming or CDC based ingestion (Kafka, Qlik, etc.).
• Certifications: AWS Database Specialty, Microsoft SQL Server/Azure DBA, or equivalent.

Experience Level

Senior Level