Senior Member Technical Staff ( Postgres DBA)

Gracenote, a Nielsen company, is dedicated to connecting audiences to the entertainment they love, powering a better media future for all people. Gracenote is the content data business unit of Nielsen that powers innovative entertainment experiences for the world’s leading media companies. Our entertainment metadata and connected IDs deliver advanced content navigation and discovery to connect consumers to the content they love and discover new ones.As a Lead Data Science Engineer on the Gracenote Media team, you will be responsible for defining the AI/ML strategy, overseeing large-scale data science projects, and leading teams to build cutting-edge machine learning solutions that scale content understanding and generation, entity linkage, and more to achieve the scale that matches our customer’s demands.

We are seeking a highly autonomous and strategic Senior MTS (P3) to architect, scale, and take full ownership of our PostgreSQL database infrastructure. At this level, you will not just maintain databases; you will drive our data architecture, define best practices for High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR), and lead cross-functional initiatives to ensure our systems are resilient, performant, and scalable. This role requires a proactive problem-solver who bridges the gap between complex application logic and optimal database design, while leveraging modern cloud infrastructure and AI technologies to future-proof our stack.

Key Responsibilities

• Architectural Leadership: Lead the design and deployment of highly scalable, distributed database architectures that support complex, high-throughput application requirements.

• Infrastructure Reliability & HA: Design, implement, and manage High Availability (HA) architectures. Configure and maintain streaming & logical replication, clustering, and automated failover mechanisms. Proactively identify single points of failure and engineer automated failover mechanisms.

• Disaster Recovery (DR): Develop, execute, and test robust disaster recovery plans. Ensure data durability through automated backup strategies and rapid point-in-time recovery (PITR) procedures.

• Advanced Query & Performance Engineering: Perform deep-dive performance tuning. Analyze complex execution plans, optimize locking behaviors, and design and implement advanced partitioning and indexing strategies.

• Cloud & Infrastructure Management: Drive the deployment, security, and cost-optimization of PostgreSQL within modern cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), utilizing infrastructure-as-code (IaC).

• End-to-End Ownership: Take full accountability for database health, migrations, and data integrity from the development phase through production deployment.

• Cross-Functional Mentorship & Ownership: Act as the ultimate owner of database health. Collaborate closely with software engineering teams to influence backend code, guide API data access patterns, and mentor junior engineers on database best practices.

• AI Integration & Tech Exploration: Lead the evaluation and integration of emerging technologies, including NoSQL data stores and AI/ML vector databases (e.g., pgvector), to solve complex business problems.

• Complex Problem Solving: Act as a key technical escalation point. Leverage strong analytical skills to diagnose deep systemic issues, perform rigorous root-cause analysis (RCA), and implement highly scalable, permanent solutions for production bottlenecks.

Department: Technology
Function: Information Technology
Experience Level: Not Applicable