Insurance👥 11 employees📍 San Francisco, California, USEst. 2022
Stream's revolutionizes the $50B workers' compensation industry through AI-powered solutions that reduce time, cost, and error in medical document management. Our products, built by former claims adj…
Job Overview
Stream powers real-time Chat, Video, Activity Feeds, and AI Moderation for billions of end-users across thousands of apps — from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users, while delivering highly reliable, low-latency services and a great developer experience.
We're looking for a hands-on Database Engineer to own PostgreSQL as a production system at Stream. You'll work directly with a small, senior team and be responsible for the performance, reliability, and operability of the databases that store and serve data for Stream's entire real-time platform.
Key Responsibilities
Performance and internals — diagnose and resolve performance issues from the query down to the storage engine: indexing strategy, query planning, vacuum and bloat management, and tuning under sustained write load.
Reliability and operations — own the operational characteristics of our Postgres fleet, including backup, replication, and high availability as we take on more responsibility for running these systems ourselves.
Scaling the data layer — work on sharding, partitioning, and the architectural decisions that keep the database performant as data and traffic grow.
Set standards for how we run Postgres, collaborate closely with application engineers to connect database behaviour to real access patterns, and help shape the long-term direction of our data infrastructure.
Required Qualifications
Deep PostgreSQL expertise — you understand the internals (MVCC, vacuum and bloat, the query planner, indexing, replication) well enough to debug hard problems and reason from first principles, not from defaults.
Production ownership at scale — you've run Postgres behind high-traffic services with large datasets and high write throughput, and you've felt and fixed the failure modes that come with that.
Self-managed databases — you've operated Postgres yourself (on Kubernetes, bare-metal, or VMs), owning backup, replication, and high availability. Managed services alone aren't enough background for this role.
Sharding and scaling — you've sharded a real Postgres workload, not only table partitioning.
An engineering mindset — you can read and write code, and you connect database behaviour to application access patterns rather than treating the DB in isolation.
Judgement alongside AI tooling — we use AI heavily in our workflows; you should be able to use it well and know when it's wrong. Deep internals knowledge is what lets you tell the difference.
Strong Plus Qualifications
Multi-tenant database experience
Experience pushing PostgreSQL beyond conventional relational use (large semi-structured or blob data, flexible query interfaces)
Messaging, social, or other high-write, event-heavy storage backgrounds
Open source contributions to database or infrastructure tooling
About Stream
Stream powers real-time Chat, Video, Activity Feeds, and AI Moderation for billions of end-users across thousands of apps — from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users, while delivering highly reliable, low-latency services and a great developer experience.
Benefits
Generous compensation Company equity 28 days PTO + Dutch public holidays Pension scheme Learning & Development budget Commute reimbursement to Amsterdam or company bike Fitness stipend Access to open-source project work Benefits are adjusted per country of residence for remote hires.
Why Stream?
High scale/ difficult engineering Default alive. Startup growth opportunity with healthy revenue Strong engineering culture. Engineering is what makes us succeed All managers are hands-on and capable engineers Edge network of servers around the world Great opportunity to learn and grow Raised $58M from leading VCs (Felicis Ventures, Notable Capital, 01.Advisors, Techstars, Arthur Ventures), including backers like Dick Costolo (01 Advisors, ex-CEO of Twitter), Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Tom Preston-Werner (Co-Founder of GitHub), Nicolas Dessaigne (Co-Founder of Algolia)
