Why This Role Matters
The Senior Database Engineer at Bluestaq owns the data systems that move and protect information behind national security decisions — the schemas, pipelines, and datastores our enterprise platform runs on. This is not a ticket-closing seat. You are the go-to engineer for a data domain: you design the schemas, tune the queries that are actually slow, keep the pipelines healthy, and lead the medium-sized data work from requirements through production. You operate independently, call out risk before it becomes an outage, and set the bar for the engineers around you.
What You Own
Own sets of tables, schemas, and data flows end-to-end within a larger product or program — including their data quality, performance, and operability over time.
Design robust relational schemas and data models with sound normalization and denormalization tradeoffs, DDL, and extensive SQL.
Work across SQL and NoSQL datastores (MongoDB, Postgres/RDS, Amazon Athena) following best practices, and represent practical DB constraints in data modeling discussions.
Lead the design and delivery of medium-sized data features — new domains, new ingest, or significant schema changes.
Build moderately complex ETL/ingest pipelines with incremental loads, error handling, and validation.
Investigate and fix non-trivial performance problems — bad query plans, missing indexes, partitioning, table bloat — and tune queries, indexes, and configurations for real workloads.
Apply database-level security controls — row-level security (e.g., Postgres RLS), roles and permissions, and auditing patterns — to protect sensitive data.
Plan and execute database upgrades, patches, and migrations with minimal disruption to dependent systems.
Serve as the escalation point for Associate and mid-level engineers on data correctness and performance, and mentor through code review and by explaining design choices.
Partner with Software Engineering, Data Modeling, Systems, and Cyber to align data design, performance, and access patterns with mission needs.
Keep database and process documentation current — schema and data-flow diagrams, runbooks, and how-to guides for operating and querying key datasets.
What You Bring
Required Education & Experience
High School Diploma/GED and 8+ years of relevant experience, OR
Associate degree in a related field and 6+ years of relevant experience, OR
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field and 4+ years of relevant experience, OR
Master's degree in a related field and 2+ years of relevant experience
Must-Haves
Relational database mastery — production experience designing, tuning, and operating one or more of Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server.
NoSQL / large-scale stores — hands-on work with MongoDB, Athena, or equivalent, and sound judgment on when to use them.
Schema and data modeling — designing normalized and denormalized structures that hold up under real-world query and storage conditions.
Performance engineering — diagnosing bad plans and bottlenecks, and applying indexing, partitioning, and query rewrites that stick.
ETL / ingest pipelines — building moderately complex loads with incremental processing, error handling, and validation.
Database security — row-level security, roles and permissions, and auditing patterns applied in production.
Backup, recovery, and disaster recovery — you know the plan and have exercised it.
Linux environments and scripting / automation — PowerShell, Bash, Python, and SQL.
SQL depth — Common Table Expressions, dynamic SQL, and the ability to reason about complex queries.
Independent delivery — you scope the work, choose the approach, surface risk, and drive it from design through rollout without being managed through it.
Mentorship and communication — you raise the bar through code review and clear technical writing for peers, leadership, and cross-functional teams.
Ownership mentality — you follow through, document your work, check downstream impact, and know…