Senior PostgreSQL DBA (AWS/RDS)

Netherlands | Up to €120k | Hybrid, 1 day/week in office | Relocation support where appropriate

This one's a bit different from the usual "DBA" brief.

Growing company handling millions of transactions a day. The data layer is starting to feel the strain: query bottlenecks, oversized instances, and PostgreSQL knowledge gaps spread across teams. So they're bringing in someone senior to actually own it, not just firefight it.

This isn't a "keep the lights on" role. It's real technical authority, the standards you set here shape how every engineering team builds on data going forward.

What you'd actually own:

PostgreSQL on AWS RDS and Aurora: performance, indexing, schema design, end to end
Backup and disaster recovery strategy, including restore testing and proper RTO/RPO targets
Major-version upgrades and zero-downtime migrations, on systems that genuinely can't afford downtime
Being the go-to PostgreSQL voice for backend and platform engineers: training, playbooks, raising the bar across teams
A seat in shaping long-term PostgreSQL strategy: tooling, observability, cost-efficiency

What they're looking for:

5+ years in database engineering/administration, PostgreSQL-first, with 4+ years in high-availability production environments
3+ years running PostgreSQL on AWS (RDS or Aurora): backups, replication, monitoring, performance tuning
Genuinely comfortable in PostgreSQL internals, planner, vacuuming, WAL, query plans, not just someone who's read about them
Cloud-native/SaaS background, ideally microservices
Git, Terraform, CI/CD, and confident enough reading Python/ORM code (SQLAlchemy, Django ORM) to have an informed opinion on it

Nice to have, not dealbreakers: connection pooling experience (RDS Proxy) at high concurrency, or contributions to open-source Postgres tooling.

Why it's worth a conversation:

Up to €120k, plus relocation support where applicable
Hybrid, just one day a week on-site in Eindhoven
Real influence, this is a role that sets the standard, not one that follows it
€2,000 annual learning budget

If you're the person other engineers already come to with the tricky Postgres questions, and you'd rather fix the root cause than patch around it, I'd like to hear from you.