---
title: 'Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer at tastylive'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-postgresql-database-administrator-database-engineer-tastylive-chicago-p4y9s1pc3hr0'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer at tastylive

- **Company:** tastylive
- **Location:** Chicago, IL
- **Posted:** 2026-08-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/tastylive/jobs/6173930004

## Job description

Company:  tastytrade

Role:  Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer

Location:  Chicago, IL — Hybrid

## About the Role

As a Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator / Database Engineer, you'll own the health, performance, and durability of high-throughput Postgres clusters running both on bare metal / on-prem VMs and on Amazon RDS. This is a hands-on role: you will read query plans, tune indexes, run failover drills, review application code, and write high-quality documentation.

This is not a ticket-queue DBA position. You will work inside the development process — reviewing migrations before they ship, pairing with application teams on data access patterns, assisting with performance troubleshooting, and contributing to incident resolution and process improvement.

What You'll Do:

- Own performance for high-volume OLTP Postgres workloads: query plan analysis, index strategy, statistics and autovacuum tuning, connection pooling, partitioning, and schema design review.
- Design, deploy, and operate highly available clusters using Patroni, including replication topology, failover and switchover procedures, and regular testing.
- Own the backup and recovery program end to end — backup tooling, retention, PITR, and, most importantly, routine restore verification with documented RTO/RPO.
- Manage Postgres in both on-prem and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL environments, including the operational differences between them (parameter groups, extension availability, failover behavior, upgrade paths).
- Plan and execute major-version upgrades and large migrations with minimal downtime.
- Review application code and database migrations written in Ruby (Rails/ActiveRecord) and Java (JDBC), catching N+1 queries, unsafe DDL, missing indexes, and lock-taking migrations before they reach production.
- Build and maintain observability for the database tier: metrics, slow query capture, lock and wait-event analysis, and capacity forecasting.
- Automate routine operations. Manual runbooks are a starting point, not a destination.
- Participate in an on-call rotation: lead incident response, write postmortems, and file follow-up tickets to prevent recurrence.
- Write and maintain internal documentation: runbooks, architecture decision records, upgrade playbooks, and developer-facing guidance on using Postgres well.
- Assist in sizing and future scaling of on-prem server hardware.
- Participate in disaster recovery planning and exercises.

Who You Are:

- You have deep PostgreSQL expertise with the query planner — you can read EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) output and explain why the planner chose a plan, not just that it was slow.
- You have hands-on indexing strategy experience across B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN, partial, expression, and covering indexes, including the write-amplification cost of each.
- You understand replication — physical and logical replication, replication slots, lag diagnosis, and the failure modes of each.
- You must have production experience with Patroni-managed clusters, including having handled a real failover.
- You must have proven ownership of a backup and restore program (pgBackRest, Barman) — including having performed a production restore under pressure.
- You have experience operating Postgres at meaningful scale in both self-managed (on-prem/VM/bare metal) and managed RDS environments.
- You must have strong Linux fundamentals: filesystem and I/O behavior, memory and hugepages, systemd, networking, and performance tooling.
- You have a software development background: creating, reviewing, and merging pull requests as part of a mandatory peer review process, and writing runbooks and design documentation.
- You have working proficiency in Ruby and Java, with enough Python literacy to read, review, and modify it confidently.
- You must be an excellent written communicator. Clear incident summaries, review comments, and design proposals are a core part of this job, not an afterthought.
- You have excellent documentation practice — a demonstrated habit of leaving systems better documented than you found them.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience with connection poolers (PgBouncer) at scale.
- Infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (Terraform, Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet, etc.).
- Kubernetes-hosted Postgres operators.
- Active-active multi-site architecture.
- Experience with logical replication–based zero-downtime migrations.
- Contributions to Postgres or its ecosystem tooling.
- Familiarity with our internal tooling, including [gascan].

Company Perks + Benefits:

- Performance Bonuses
- Stock Purchase Options
- Medical/Vision/Dental Benefits
- 401k Plan
- 20 Paid Vacation Days (plus an additional paid vacation day the month of your birthday!)
- 10 Paid Sick Days
- Gym Membership Reimbursement
- Commuter Benefits
- Pet Insurance
- Wellness & Mental Health Programs
- Charitable Donation Matching
- Two Paid Volunteer Days Off
- Daily catered lunch when in the office
- Full kitchen with snacks and beverages
- In-building gym
- Shuttle to/from Metra

Base Salary Range: $150,000-$180,000 The actual salary offered will be based on the candidate's level of experience and qualifications.

Discretionary Performance Bonus: 8-12% of base salary based on individual and company performance.

## About IGNA + tasty

IG North America is home to tastytrade, tastylive & tastyfx—a family of brands built to democratize trading and empower individual investors. Founded in Chicago by the creators of thinkorswim, acquired by London-based IG Group in 2021, we combine startup innovation with the backing of a FTSE 100 fintech operating across five continents serving over 1.3m customers and handling billions of dollars in transactions – built on scale, trust, and proof.

From our headquarters in Chicago's Fulton Market, our team builds award-winning trading platforms, produces live financial education content daily, and creates technology that makes complex markets accessible. tastytrade is our retail brokerage for self-directed investing and trading, with tastylive providing content to educate our customers. tastyfx is the fastest-growing forex broker in the US. tastycrypto provides self-custody digital wallets for decentralized finance.

We're a lean, collaborative team that values autonomy, pragmatism, and impact. Whether you're building technology, creating content, serving customers, or supporting operations, you'll work alongside people who are passionate about disrupting traditional finance and genuinely care about helping traders succeed. Our culture rewards initiative, embraces experimentation, and measures success by the value we create for our users. The bar is high – bring a curious and forward-thinking mindset and we'll give you the platform to define what comes next. Join us at IG|tasty – the future gets built here.

Location: Our office is in the West Loop - Chicago's growing center of tech, great cuisine, and high-end bars.

[tastytrade](https://tastytrade.com/) | [tastylive](https://www.tastylive.com/)  | [tastyfx](https://www.tastyfx.com/) 1330 W Fulton Market, Chicago, IL 60607

*Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they have every single qualification. Our team is dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your experience doesn’t align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles!

## About tastylive

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: tastylive is a financial network and media company that provides live, educational content and analysis for options and futures trading.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Total Funding: $47M, Series C in 2018)
- **Headquarters**: Chicago, Illinois, United States
- **Founded**: 2017 (as tastylive; the broader tastytrade ecosystem has earlier roots)
- **Founders**: Tom Sosnoff

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Financial Services, Financial Media, Fintech
- Target customers: B2C retail investors and traders, primarily focused on options and futures derivatives trading
- Mission or purpose statement: To make investing fun and provide actionable, educational market talk to individual investors.

## Products & Services
- **tastylive (Network/Media)**: A live, daily financial network broadcasting 8 hours of market talk during market hours (7:00am CT). Shows include *Market Measures*, *Good Trade Bad Trade*, and *Bootstrapping in America*.
- **tastytrade (Brokerage)**: A retail brokerage subsidiary providing professional-grade technology for trading equities, equity options, futures, and futures options at industry-leading prices. (Wholly owned subsidiary of tastytrade, part of the same family).
- **tastyworks (Trading Platform)**: The platform and tools for trading derivatives.
- **The Small Exchange**: Retail-accessible futures products.
- **Quiet Foundation**: A free investment advisory service.
- **dough**: A content-filled, easy-to-use stock-trading app.
- **luckbox**: A monthly print and digital financial magazine.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $47.0M (Series C led by TCV in 2018).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: TCV (lead investor, Series C).
- **Growth Signals**: Part of a broader family of companies (tastytrade, tastyworks, Small Exchange) that serve the full lifecycle of an individual investor. Headcount is 50 employees, though down ~19.5% YoY.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Integrated Ecosystem**: Offers a unique, vertically integrated suite of services: a live financial network (tastylive), a brokerage (tastytrade), a trading platform (tastyworks), and educational content (dough, luckbox).
- **Founder-Led & Experienced**: Led by Tom Sosnoff, a veteran with decades of experience in the financial industry, having previously co-founded thinkorswim.
- **Educational Focus**: Strong emphasis on making complex derivatives trading accessible and understandable through live, entertaining content.
- **Community & Brand**: Cult-like following among retail options traders, built on a transparent, "no-BS" approach to market analysis.

## Strategic Focus
- **Deepening the Vertical**: Continuing to fill the financial vertical with products for every stage of the investor journey (education, analysis, brokerage, advisory).
- **Digital Asset Expansion**: The company has a Head of Digital Assets, indicating a strategic push into cryptocurrency and digital asset-related trading products and content.
- **Global Reach**: Presence in Bangladesh and Italy, with a Lead of Chinese Market Development, suggesting a focus on international market expansion.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as collaborative, innovative, and transparent. Employee reviews on LinkedIn rate the culture at 4.6/5.0.
- **Work-Life Balance**: Rated highly by employees at 4.7/5.0.
- **Compensation & Career**: Compensation rated 4.5/5.0, Career opportunities rated 4.4/5.0.
- **Work Model**: In-Office. All jobs listed are based at the Chicago HQ (1330 W Fulton Market, #620, Chicago, IL 60607).
- **Notable Perks**: Opportunity to work at the intersection of finance and media, with a direct impact on products used by a passionate trading community. Tech stack includes Python, React, Ruby, Java, and modern tools (Salesforce, Workday, Slack, etc.).

## Sources
1. [tastylive Careers Page](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/tastylive)
2. [tastylive Official Website](https://www.tastylive.com/)
3. [LinkedIn Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/tastyliveshow)
4. [Built In Chicago Company Profile](https://builtin.com/company/tastylive)
5. [tastylive Contact Page](https://www.tastylive.com/contact-us)

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