Tech Lead/Principal Engineer, Public Sector

Exiger is hiring for its Government Delivery organization to establish and own reusable database engineering patterns for U.S. federal programs. The role is hands-on and production-facing, spanning shared data infrastructure, security and recovery practices, program support, escalations, and customer discussions about data posture.

Responsibilities:

• Own the reference database posture programs adopt: instance design, replication topology, parameter tuning, connection management, query plan health
• Set and govern schema conventions across programs. Treat schema as an interface other engineers consume, and the conventions as a product they inherit
• Build the backup, restore, and disaster-recovery patterns as reusable tooling, proven by real recovery drills, not program-by-program improvisation
• Own database security patterns inside the FedRAMP boundary: encryption at rest and in transit, least-privilege access, audit logging, replicated across engagements
• Build and maintain zero-downtime migration and schema change tooling program teams use on live traffic
• Partner with Platform Engineering on the shared infrastructure seam (cluster topology, parameter groups, snapshot policy, monitoring) and with Data Engineering on the production-to-analytics seam
• Support program teams operating on your patterns, and carry escalation on-call for the data plane across the portfolio
• Sit in customer-context conversations about data posture (residency, retention, encryption, access) across programs

Requirements:

• 5+ years of production database engineering at scale on at least one major relational engine (PostgreSQL preferred; Aurora, MySQL, or Oracle at depth also acceptable)
• Strong query plan literacy; can read EXPLAIN ANALYZE and reason about it without a profiler
• Production experience with zero-downtime schema migrations on live traffic
• Production experience with at least one OLAP or analytics store (Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery, ClickHouse)
• Production experience on AWS, particularly RDS / Aurora (PostgreSQL flavor preferred)
• Hands-on experience inside a FedRAMP boundary (Moderate or High)
• Experience building database patterns, tooling, or standards consumed by teams beyond your own (central DBRE / DBA practice experience is directly relevant)
• Familiarity with the database side of an ATO continuous-monitoring cycle
• Strong customer-facing posture: comfortable explaining data residency, retention, and encryption decisions in front of a customer
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance
• Active U.S. Government security clearance preferred (Secret minimum for most engagements; TS or TS/SCI required for a subset)
• Hands-on experience with both row-store and column-store engines in the same environment
• Familiarity with logical replication topologies (Postgres logical replication, AWS DMS) for CDC into an analytics layer
• Experience with vector storage (pgvector, OpenSearch k-NN, Pinecone) for ML retrieval workloads
• Experience with database security tooling at federal grade (TDE, Vault, AWS KMS with customer-managed keys)
• PostGIS or other spatial extension experience for geospatial domains
• Experience operating in IL5, IL6, or JWICS environments