Database engineer

A database engineer designs, builds, and optimizes the database systems that store and serve an application's data. They model data and schema, optimize queries and performance, ensure scalability and reliability, and may work on the internals of database systems themselves — focused on making data storage fast, consistent, and able to handle growth.

The role is more engineering- and architecture-focused than a database administrator's operational work, requiring deep knowledge of how databases work under the hood. Database engineers work at data-intensive companies.

The job suits people who enjoy the challenges of data at scale, care about performance and correctness, and like solving the hard problems that emerge when systems must store and retrieve enormous amounts of data quickly.