Sr Database Design Engineer

Sr Database Design Engineer
Location: Rochester NY / REMOTE
Full-Time Employment with CLIENT

This position is remote eligible but candidates local to Rochester, NY are highly desirable.
NOTE: If you are working remotely, you must be able to travel to Rochester, NY on as-needed basis (about once a quarter).

This role serves as the Subject Matter Expert for relational database design and tuning for Linux-based medical devices with on-device databases, with ongoing stewardship of the database architecture over the product lifecycle.

The successful candidate will own database schema design, query strategy, and cross-component data access patterns to ensure long-term maintainability, performance, and regulatory compliance. This is an opportunity to shape the data backbone of safety-critical systems that must operate reliably for years in the field, often without frequent upgrades or migrations.

The Responsibilities
This role will focus on the design and implementation of robust applications for distributed Linux-based software systems while leading efforts in database schema and integration. Candidates should demonstrate expertise in relational database design and on-device database integration.

• Serve as the database architecture owner for PostgreSQL or equivalent database instances embedded within medical devices running Linux on workstation-class hardware.
• Design relational schemas, views, indexes, and constraints that balance performance, maintainability, and regulatory traceability.
• Own and maintain the database design over time, including governance of schema changes, technical debt management, documentation, and coordination of design evolution across releases.
• Act as the central design authority for how multiple software components read from and write to shared database resources.
• Design database interfaces and usage patterns that minimize the need for future migrations, while still enabling safe, versioned evolution when required.
• Lead query optimization and performance tuning, including execution plan analysis, indexing strategy, and long-term capacity planning.
• Define standards for database versioning, migration strategy, and backward compatibility suitable for regulated, fielded systems.
• Collaborate with system architects, middleware developers, and UI teams to ensure database access patterns are well-defined, testable, and stable.
• Provide technical leadership in design reviews related to data modeling, persistence strategy, and cross-process communication via the database.
• Support backup, restore, and recovery strategies appropriate for on-device databases in production medical equipment.
• Participate in requirements, architecture, design, verification, and validation activities within a regulated quality management system (FDA, IEC 62304, ISO 13485).
• Perform other work-related duties as assigned.

Required:

• B.S. or M.S. Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related discipline required.
• Minimum of 5 years required with bachelor's or 3 years with master's degree, preferably leading in a medical device environment or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Demonstrated expertise in designing and evolving relational schemas; optimizing queries through execution plan analysis; and defining indexing, view, and data-access layers that support multiple consumers.
• Experience supporting on-device or embedded databases, where the database runs locally on a deployed system rather than as a managed cloud service.
• Strong understanding of data evolution strategies, including migrations, versioned schemas, and backward compatibility.
• Experience working in regulated or safety-critical environments (medical devices strongly preferred).
• Working knowledge of C++ or similar programming language sufficient to collaborate with application developers and review database interaction code.
• Strong analytical skills and ability to reason about system-wide performance and data integrity tradeoffs.
• Ability to travel 5% or less, domestically.

Preferred:

• Experience tuning databases for non-cloud, appliance-style deployments.
• Familiarity with Linux-based embedded or semi-embedded systems (Yocto, Ubuntu, or similar).
• Experience designing database schemas that support concurrent access by multiple services or processes.
• Knowledge of database migration tools and strategies suitable for deployed products with limited upgrade windows.
• Prior experience executing database migrations (including planning, risk mitigation, validation, and rollback) and applying lessons learned to improve future migration practices.
• Familiarity with scripting or automation (SQL, Python, Bash) for diagnostics, profiling, and maintenance tooling.
• Understanding of observability concerns related to databases (logging, metrics, tracing).
• Experience collaborating across software, systems, quality, and regulatory teams.