Senior Database Engineer

About Us: Spreedly is the Intelligent Payments Platform for businesses that want to own their payments strategy. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Durham, NC, we give merchants, platforms, and fintechs a single API to connect to 150+ payment gateways and 40+ payment methods across 100+ countries, along with the intelligence to decide where every transaction should go. We're vendor-agnostic by design. Our customers choose their providers, keep their payment data portable, and never have to rebuild their stack to adopt something new. Payments are getting more complex, not less. Every new market, payment method, fraud tool, and now every AI agent checking out on a shopper's behalf adds another integration and another decision. Spreedly turns that complexity into an advantage. Our PCI Level 1 vault keeps cards and network tokens portable across providers. Smart routing and retries recover revenue lost to avoidable declines. Fraud and 3DS tools plug in with a single API call. And our payments intelligence turns transaction data into decisions merchants can act on. As agentic commerce moves from experiment to real sales channel, we're building the infrastructure that lets merchants accept agent-initiated payments through the providers they already trust. For the people who work here, that means hard technical problems at real scale, billions of dollars in annual transactions, at a moment when the rules of commerce are being rewritten. If you want ownership and work that shows up directly in your customers' revenue, you'll fit right in. About the Role Spreedly is hiring a Senior Database Engineer to become the go-to database expert on our Reliability team. You'll improve the performance and reliability of our existing distributed database environment and help engineering teams make database changes safely. This is a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports, and "senior" here means more than years of experience: you'll be the person the rest of engineering looks to on anything at the database layer. The opportunity is to shape how we manage and improve our databases, not to lead a migration. We already run CockroachDB, with infrastructure operated through Cockroach Labs' managed service. That means your focus is the part that's ours to own: workload, schema, queries, settings, capacity, and the practices around change. Our Reliability team works across application engineering, infrastructure, and platform to improve monitoring, prevent incidents, and recover quickly when incidents happen. It isn't a textbook SRE team. It's a small, highly autonomous group focused on continuous improvement, with real room to see a problem, propose a fix, and carry it through within the team's priorities. Database availability and performance matter a great deal in a payments environment, and the improvements you make here show up directly in the reliability our customers depend on. Responsibilities: Responsibilities Improve database performance • Investigate our current database setup to find performance bottlenecks and reliability risks, using instrumentation, code review, and staging tests where appropriate. • Find and improve slow-running queries, identify missing or inefficient indexes, and evaluate database settings against what the application actually needs. • Diagnose distributed-database issues such as transaction contention and retries, hot ranges, and inefficient access patterns, and partner with application engineers to fix them at the source. • Establish performance baselines so meaningful changes in workload behavior are visible early. Be the database subject-matter expert • Help engineering teams understand the risks and trade-offs of significant changes before they reach production, including schema migra