Principal Database Administrator (DBA)

PNL · Portugal

About Finom

Finom is a European tech startup headquartered in Amsterdam, and we’re on a journey towards revolutionizing the financial landscape for entrepreneurs worldwide. Our mission is to develop an all-in-one financial B2B solution that integrates banking functions, accounting, financial management, and invoicing into a seamless, mobile-first platform.

We recently closed a €115 million Series C equity round (around $133 million), bringing our total funding to approximately $346 million. This significant investment follows a $105 million growth funding round from General Catalyst, a long-term backer since 2021 known for supporting companies like Airbnb, HubSpot, KAYAK, and Stripe.

Finom's platform goes beyond traditional banking, offering invoicing and a growing suite of features, including AI-enabled accounting, aiming to simplify financial management for entrepreneurs. We're actively expanding our reach across key EU markets like Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain.

At Finom, we’re not just redefining the entrepreneurial experience — we’re empowering our employees to make a real difference. Your work matters, and your impact extends far beyond product metrics. We nurture innovation and an inspiring work environment where bold ideas thrive, prioritizing thorough research, swift implementation of solutions, and ensuring that every effort we make benefits our users, employees, partners, and our business as a whole.

Maintaining our start-up spirit, we prioritize thorough research, swift implementation of solutions, and ensuring that every effort we make benefits our users, employees, partners, and, of course, our business.

We are looking for a Principal Database Administrator to serve as the ultimate reliability owner of Finom’s banking database infrastructure. At Finom, our data is the heartbeat of our services; we need a visionary engineer who can balance high-level architectural strategy with a "roll-up-your-sleeves" approach to implementation and operations.

What You Will Be Doing

  • Own Database Reliability: Drive high availability and disaster recovery strategies, ensuring RPO/RTO targets are met for our core banking systems.

  • Architect for Scale: Define and execute the scalability roadmap, including partitioning, sharding strategies, and capacity forecasting.

  • Optimize Performance: Perform deep-dive query optimization, execution plan analysis, and proactive bottleneck remediation.

  • Design Infrastructure: Build and manage scalable inference and connection pooling strategies (PgBouncer) and robust backup/restore automations.

  • Establish Observability: Design the monitoring architecture (Prometheus, Grafana, VictoriaMetrics) and define SLIs/SLOs for database health.

  • Champion Security: Implement banking-grade security practices, including credential management and compliance-aligned data handling.

  • Partner Across Engineering: Work with product teams to ensure database schema changes and architectural decisions support a high-load environment.

  • Lead by Example: Set the technical bar for the DBA function through mentoring, standards definition, and hands-on implementation.

    • Who You Are

  • Technical Authority: You possess a deep, "under-the-hood" understanding of PostgreSQL internals (MVCC, WAL, vacuum, etc.)

  • Reliability-First: You understand that in fintech, data integrity and availability are non-negotiable.

  • Pragmatic Architect: You can turn complex business requirements into robust, scalable data models.

  • Autonomous Leader: You are comfortable taking full ownership of the database landscape without heavy supervision.

  • Clear Communicator: You can explain complex architectural trade-offs to both engineers and stakeholders.

    • Must-Haves

  • 5+ years of experience as a PostgreSQL DBA in high-load, production environments (preferably Fintech or mission-critical systems).

  • Deep PostgreSQL Expertise: Advanced knowledge of index design (B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN), partitioning, and vacuum tuning.

  • HA/DR Mastery: Proven experience designing streaming replication, clustering, and automated backup validation.

  • Cloud Fluency: Hands-on experience with cloud-managed PostgreSQL (specifically GCP) and Linux systems administration.

  • Automation Mindset: Proficient with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD workflows (GitLab, ArgoCD).

  • Strong SQL Skills: Expertise in complex queries, stored procedures, and functions.

  • Observability Stack: Experience building monitoring and alerting for databases (Prometheus/Grafana).

  • Fluent English

    • Nice-to-Haves

  • Compliance Experience: Working within frameworks like PCI DSS or GDPR.

  • Multi-Stack Experience: Familiarity with Redis, BigQuery, or additional data systems (Cassandra, ClickHouse).

  • Advanced Tooling: Experience with various connection pooling tools beyond PgBouncer.

  • Security Pro: Deep knowledge of secure secrets and credential management practices.

    • Our Infrastructure Landscape

  • GCP (primary cloud, ~90%)

  • GKE (Kubernetes)

  • GitLab CI

  • Terraform

  • ArgoCD (GitOps)

  • Kafka (Confluent)

  • Vault

  • Prometheus / Grafana

  • Cloud Logging

  • PostgreSQL

    • Apply →