Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator

About DrFirst

For 25 years, DrFirst has empowered providers and patients to achieve better health through intelligent medication management. We improve healthcare workflows and help patients start and stay on therapy with end-to-end solutions that enhance prescription access, affordability, and adherence. Our solutions help 100 million patients a year and are used by more than 420,000 prescribers, 71,000 pharmacies, 270 EHRs and health information systems, and over 2,000 hospitals in the U.S. This is a great opportunity to be a part of a successful Healthcare IT company experiencing significant growth. Here you'll get to work with some of the smartest and most interesting people around, solving unique and complex challenges in healthcare on a scale matched by few companies. If you get excited about stretching yourself in new ways, developing yourself to your fullest potential, and care about working with smart colleagues, we want to talk to you!

Position Overview

We are seeking a cloud native Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator for our System Operations team. This role sits at the center of how data moves through DrFirst. PostgreSQL on AWS Aurora serves as one critical layer inside a broader, event driven persistence architecture. You will think beyond a single database. You will think about how data enters our platform from prescribers, pharmacies, EHRs, and patient channels, how it moves through message and event brokers, how it lands in PostgreSQL and complementary stores, and how applications read it back reliably at scale.

This is a hands on, automation first role for someone who treats the database as part of a connected data ecosystem rather than a standalone box.

Who Will Love This Role

• A modern data thinker who sees PostgreSQL as one layer in a larger persistence story spanning streaming data, event brokers, caching, and search.
• A problem solver who enjoys diagnosing complex performance issues across distributed systems and shipping clean, durable fixes.
• An automation enthusiast who writes Python and shell scripts to remove toil and scale operations through code.
• A reliability minded engineer who takes pride in backup strategy, disaster recovery readiness, and meeting tight RTO and RPO targets.
• A collaborative team player who works closely with DevOps, application engineering, and architecture on event driven, cloud native designs.
• A continuous learner who stays current with PostgreSQL, AWS, streaming platforms, and the broader cloud data field.

What you will work on

Cloud Native Database Operations

• Manage daily operations of PostgreSQL on AWS Aurora across multiple accounts and environments.
• Own database setup, configuration, parameter tuning, and deployment using cloud native patterns.
• Execute upgrades, patches, and version migrations with minimal downtime using blue green and rolling deployment strategies.
• Monitor database health, performance, and capacity using CloudWatch, Performance Insights, AppDynamics, and Grafana.

Modern Persistence and Event Driven Data Flow

• Operate PostgreSQL as the system of record inside an event driven architecture, where data arrives from many upstream sources through message and event brokers.
• Collaborate with application and platform engineering on how data flows from event streams such as Kafka and Kinesis into PostgreSQL and back out to consumers.
• Partner on caching and in memory data patterns such as Redis or ElastiCache that sit in front of PostgreSQL for high read workloads.
• Help shape a unified persistence layer that gives applications consistent, reliable data regardless of which upstream system originated it.
• Support read replicas, logical replication, and change data capture patterns that feed downstream analytics, search, and reporting systems.

Performance Optimization at Scale

• Tune PostgreSQL and Aurora configurations for OLTP, read heavy reporting, and mixed workloads.
• Analyze and resolve performance bottlenecks using EXPLAIN ANALYZE, pg_stat_statements, Performance Insights, and CloudWatch metrics.
• Optimize indexes, query plans, connection pooling, and parameter groups for fast response times on patient facing workflows.
• Review SQL, data models, and access patterns with development teams before they reach production.

AWS Cloud Infrastructure

• Use Aurora PostgreSQL features including read replicas, Global Database, automated backups, point in time recovery, and high availability configurations.
• Use AWS services including RDS, CloudWatch, Systems Manager, Lambda, S3, IAM, and Secrets Manager for database operations.
• Apply AWS best practices for se