Cloud Database Engineer

Founded in 1986, KPA is a leading provider of Workforce Compliance software and consulting services. We succeed if our clients can send their employees home at night, having not experienced a workplace accident or injury. The combination of software, consulting, and training helps clients identify, remedy, and prevent workplace safety and compliance problems so they can focus on what’s important – their core business.  Help us help keep people safe and businesses working efficiently. Named as one of Built In Colorado’s Best Places to Work for six years in a row, KPA is made up of talented individuals working together for the greater good. We’re here to help our clients build safe, thriving organizations, and we’re looking for people with a common goal to help us do it. 
Position Description:We are seeking a highly skilled and proactive Cloud Database Engineer to lead the design, implementation, and management of cloud-based database solutions across Microsoft SQL Server in Azure and PostgreSQL in AWS Aurora. This role blends hands-on engineering with performance tuning, observability, automation, and secure-by-default practices in a multi-cloud environment. You’ll partner with application teams, DevOps/SRE, Security, and Analytics to deliver resilient, cost-efficient, and well-governed data services across the enterprise.
Key Responsibilities:

Cloud Database Management

• Own the reliability, availability, and performance of PostgreSQL (self-managed & AWS Aurora) and SQL Server across dev, test, and production environments.
•  Design and implement automation for provisioning, upgrades/patching, backup/restore, failover, and routine maintenance (e.g., vacuum/reindex, integrity checks).
• Automate database provisioning and deployment using CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Terraform).
• Integrate and manage Amazon RDS Proxy to improve scalability, connection pooling, and failover for Aurora PostgreSQL.
• Harden security: role-based access, least privilege, auditing, encryption in transit/at rest, secret management, and compliant data handling.
• Ensure database security, encryption, and compliance with internal and external standards.
• Optimize cloud spend (instance types, storage classes, IOPS, connection pooling, right-sizing) while meeting SLAs.

Performance & Optimization

• Tune queries and schemas using execution plans, indexing strategies (B-tree, GIN/GiST, BRIN, columnstore where applicable), and workload-aware partitioning.
• Implement observability and capacity planning: monitor key health metrics, create actionable alerts, and lead root-cause analysis and post-mortems using tools like Azure Monitor, AWS CloudWatch, and Datadog.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues, including on-call support during critical deployments.

Development & Collaboration

• Lead and review database change management with version-controlled migrations (e.g., Flyway and SQL Server Data Tools).
• Partner with developers on schema design, stored procedures, and performance optimized code; guide efficient ORM usage and connection management.
• Participate in agile sprint planning and provide database-related estimates and deliverables.
• Lead efforts to build and maintain data warehouses and master data management solutions.

Advanced Data Capabilities

• Implement and optimize vector search capabilities in PostgreSQL to support AI/ML and semantic search use cases.
• Design and manage JSONB data structures for flexible, semi-structured data storage and querying.
• Support integration with NoSQL platforms (e.g., DynamoDB, Cosmos DB) for high-throughput, schema-less workloads such as telemetry, session state, or caching.

Innovation & Strategy

• Champion continuous improvement and innovation through prototypes, proof of concepts, and iterative experiments.
• Contribute to cloud migration strategies and modernization of legacy database systems.
• Provide thought leadership on database architecture and best practices.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience as a DBA or Database Engineer.
• 2+ years managing Azure SQL Server and AWS Aurora PostgreSQL in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in T-SQL and PL/pgSQL.
• Experience with ETL tools (e.g., SSIS, AWS Glue) and BI platforms (e.g., Power BI, Tableau).
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and DevOps practices.
Preferred Skills:
• Experience with Redgate, SQL Server Data Tools, pgAdmin or DBeaver.
• Knowledge of encryption, clusteri