Senior Software Engineer, Database Systems

About the role

Everlaw is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Database Systems to drive the development of our core data infrastructure. As a mid-sized SaaS company experiencing rapid growth, our challenge isn't just storing data - it's designing and writing the code that ensures data is highly available, performant at scale, and ready to power the next generation of AI-driven features. In this role, you will be a key contributor and software design owner for our databases and storage layer, moving fluidly between low-level performance coding and high-level system architecture. You will spend most of your time designing and writing code to build robust, scalable solutions. You will collaborate closely with a core squad of engineers and provide guidance to engineers across the broader engineering organization to level up their database expertise. You'll also collaborate with (and learn from) a community of other senior and staff engineers with expertise in search, cloud infrastructure, full stack SaaS application design, data science, and performance. Note: We value "applied" expertise. We are looking for a software engineer who loves the theory but lives for the practice of building reliable, high-performance production data systems.

Key facts

What you'll do

Architect and develop Everlaw's database and storage strategy by defining how our primary transactional databases interface with our coding architecture, caching layers, and analytics data store.

Develop and implement sharding and replication systems, driving the implementation strategy for horizontal scaling, including designing and coding logical partitioning and sharding.

Engineer database performance by diving deep into database internals, focusing on code-level optimizations to analyze and improve memory management, disk I/O, and query execution plans.

Build migration tooling for low-downtime operations, designing and developing database migration tooling and strategies for SQL environments to ensure high availability and minimal business interruption.

Build observability systems to develop and maintain internal tooling that provides deep visibility into database health and bottleneck identification before they impact customers.

Collaborate with a core squad of engineers while providing mentorship and guidance to level up database expertise across the broader engineering organization.

Stay current with industry trends, evaluating when to adopt emerging technologies versus optimizing our existing stack, and bring back learnings to apply to our work.

Take ownership of complex database problems, balancing theoretical principles with hands-on implementation to deliver reliable and high-performance production systems.

Contribute to a vibrant engineering culture by participating in code reviews, design discussions, and knowledge-sharing sessions that push the boundaries of our data infrastructure.

Drive the delivery of reliable, scalable, and maintainable database systems that directly enable Everlaw's AI-driven product roadmap and long-term strategic goals.

Requirements

You have at least 5 years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3 years of experience in database engineering.

You have a deep understanding of the storage engines and locking mechanisms of at least one major RDBMS (Postgres or MySQL).

You are proficient in SQL and skilled at writing complex queries, including window functions, CTEs, and advanced joins.

You understand transaction semantics, isolation levels, and concurrency control mechanisms in modern databases.

You have hands-on experience with database schema design, indexing strategies, and query optimization in a production environment.

You have built, operated, or maintained systems that scale to millions of rows or high throughput operations.

You are comfortable reading and interpreting execution plans and using performance profiling tools to identify bottlenecks.

You have experience with version control, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code practices for database changes.

You are comfortable working in a fast-paced environment where priorities can shift quickly and ambiguity is part of the day-to-day work.

Practical notes

This is a full-time, exempt position located onsite (3 days/week in office) in Oakland, California.