The posting
What are we building?
Hard Rock Digital is a fiercely focused team working to become the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We're building a deeply curious team with a passion for learning, operating, and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We're customer-obsessed — we care about each customer interaction, experience, behavior, and insight, and strive to ensure we're always acting authentically.
Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known the world over as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We're taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space - ready to join us?
What's the position?
Every bet and payout at Hard Rock Digital is a database transaction that has to be fast and accurate. A casino game resolves in milliseconds; settling a big sporting event moves millions of balances at once, and none can be wrong.
We're hiring Senior Database Infrastructure Engineers to own the PostgreSQL, MySQL, and ClickHouse databases behind our platform and work alongside the team that runs our CockroachDB clusters. Which engine you know best matters less than how well you understand what each one does underneath, well enough to explain why the same workload behaves differently on two of them.
A database problem rarely stays inside the database. The people who do well here follow it into the application code, the platform, and the architecture decisions, and they want their scope at Hard Rock Digital to grow with it.
Claude Code, Codex, and similar AI harnesses are part of how this team works. We use them to investigate incidents and turn one-off debugging into durable tooling, so more time goes to work that compounds: better defaults, safer migrations, and shorter incidents.
What You'll Do
Operations
- Operate PostgreSQL and MySQL on Amazon RDS across production, staging, and development: replication, failover, backup and recovery, upgrades, and each engine's own failure modes, from autovacuum and wraparound to purge and replica lag.
- Run ClickHouse for both operational and analytical workloads: table engines, sort keys, partitioning, merges, replication, and the ingestion paths that feed it.
- Support CockroachDB operations, and take on more of that work as you learn the system.
Performance & Reliability
- Trace slow queries and lock waits behind bets, settlements, and payouts to the plan, the statistics, and the schema or code that caused them.
- Assess schema-change risk before it reaches large tables, and review schemas and queries with application teams before they ship.
- Build observability in Prometheus, Grafana, Mimir, and Loki, join the data-layer on-call rota, and lead incident analysis and blameless postmortems.
Tooling & Influence
- Build Python and Go tooling, and automate provisioning and recovery with Terraform.
- Use AI harnesses daily, and verify their output against production facts before you ship it.
- Implement and audit access controls and encryption for a regulated gaming platform.
- Set standards that hold across engines, take part in architecture reviews, and read the source when a problem needs a code-level answer.
What are we looking for?
- 5+ years operating production relational databases as a DBA, Database Reliability Engineer, or Data Platform Engineer.
- Deep production experience with PostgreSQL and MySQL, or deep experience with one and serious working experience with the other.
- You understand these engines underneath and can compare them: PostgreSQL's heap and row versions against InnoDB's clustered index and undo log, write-ahead logging, cost-based planning, replication and what each failover option can lose, and how a columnar engine like ClickHouse differs from both.
- Enough grounding in distributed systems (consensus, distributed transactions, consistency models) to learn CockroachDB quickly
- Python or Go, and enough Java to debug line-of-business code.
- Linux, infrastructure-as-code, a monitoring stack such as Grafana, AWS, and willingness to join an on-call rota.
- Clear technical writing and speech: you can explain a hard problem to an engineer or a product manager without losing the part that matters.
How You Work
- You learn a new system from the bottom up: the source, the design documents, and experiments you run yourself.
- When the documentation is wrong or silent, you find out what the system really does and write it down.
- You want a bigger job than the one you were hired into, and you look for it here.
- You want this role to be your main professional focus, not one engagement among several.
What You've Done
- Shipped Python or Go tooling for database operations, migration safety, or incident response that other engineers then used.
- Investigated production incidents end-to-end, down to execution plans and source code.
- Moved a workload between engines or across major versions, and can tell us what surprised you.
- Took on work outside the database because the problem needed it, and changed how another team built or shipped.
- Run ClickHouse, CockroachDB, or another distributed database in production.
- Worked with Kafka, Materialize, or Snowflake.
- Used AI coding agents in real work, with review habits that keep output tied to evidence.
What’s in it for you?
We offer our employees more than just competitive compensation. Our team benefits include:
- Competitive pay and benefits
- Flexible vacation allowance
- A hybrid / remote working environment
- Startup culture backed by a secure, global brand
Roster of Uniques
We care deeply about every interaction our customers have with us, and trust and empower our staff to own and drive their experience. Our vision for our business and customers is built on fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where regardless of background or beliefs you feel able to be authentic and bring all your talent into play. We want to celebrate you being you (we are an equal opportunity employer).
