Senior Software Engineer, Database Engineer

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Data Platform team at TRM Labs, you develop, operate, and scale relational database systems that serve data at petabyte scale. You own the serving layer end to end, from query performance to cost to availability, on infrastructure that product teams depend on every day to help investigators trace illicit activity and disrupt crime.

What you'll do

• Keep customer-facing APIs fast and available at five-nines by owning query tuning, index design, and schema optimization on petabyte-scale Postgres/Citus, directly determining whether product teams can serve data in real time
• Cut storage and compute costs materially by using AI-assisted analysis paired with Claude to detect compression and data-model opportunities, then shipping validated changes to production
• Remove team toil by building agentic automation for routine database operations such as self-serve pgbouncer provisioning, disk scaling, and blue-green deployments so any engineer can run them safely
• Protect data integrity and latency by driving agentic validation of database changes before they reach production
• Keep real-time data flowing by managing CDC pipelines (PeerDB, Fivetran, Debezium) and using AI tooling to debug replication failures faster
• Shape the next-generation platform by migrating workloads off first-gen infrastructure and prototyping new data stores with AI-accelerated spikes
• Raise the whole team's leverage by codifying your workflows into AI-native runbooks and internal tooling that teammates reuse

What you bring

• 5-8 years building and operating production PostgreSQL (Citus, Aurora, AlloyDB, or equivalent distributed Postgres)
• Deep SQL optimization skills including Explain Plans, CTEs, window functions, partitioning, index design, and query-planner behavior in distributed environments, increasingly paired with AI-assisted query analysis
• Hands-on experience with CDC tools (PeerDB, Fivetran, Debezium, Datastream, Airbyte) and comfort using AI tooling to debug replication failure modes
• Fluency with database profiling tools (pganalyze or equivalent) to interpret metrics and logs, including using LLMs to summarize performance findings
• Production automation experience in Python or Go, including agentic automation of routine database tasks
• Daily use of AI coding tools (Claude, Copilot) to accelerate development and produce higher-quality output faster, with the judgment to know when to trust or reject AI output
• A track record of using AI-assisted analysis to drive measurable cost or performance improvements in production database systems

Nice to have

• Postgres extension development experience

What we offer

• Base salary range of $200,000-$220,000 (US-based; compensation adjusted for other geographies)
• Eligibility to participate in TRM's equity plan
• Distributed-first work structure across US and Canada working hours with async-first collaboration
• On-call rotation approximately once every 15 days (24-hour window across 2 days); pending regional compliance review for Canada portion

About TRM Labs

TRM Labs provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime. TRM is a Series C company with $220M in total funding, backed by Goldman Sachs, Bessemer, Y Combinator, Thoma Bravo, and others, with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore.