Staff Software Engineer, Performance
Judi Health · Denver
$200,800–$251,000
Jul 15, 2026
Denver
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Staff Engineer role focused almost entirely on PostgreSQL performance at scale within a healthcare claims platform. The work centers on diagnosing production database bottlenecks, building benchmarking and regression-detection infrastructure, defining performance contracts for the database layer, and driving architectural changes such as async I/O migration and cluster topology improvements. Suits a deeply experienced database engineer comfortable leading cross-team technical standards without direct authority.
Staff level · 10+ years · New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA · Full-time
Pay in the description: $200,800–$251,000
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $134,433 (middle half $95,331–$179,625). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role is posted across three metros (New York NY, Denver CO, Charlotte NC) with different salary bands. The NYC range ($200,800–$251,000) is reported here as it is listed first; Denver is $184,000–$230,000 and Charlotte is $167,200–$209,000.
SOC classification is Medium confidence: the role is primarily a database architecture/performance engineering role (15-1243), but it also involves building benchmarking infrastructure, CI-integrated performance gates, and application-level code (Rust/Go/C++), which pulls toward Software Developers (15-1252). The database architecture and optimization work is the clear primary focus.
The 'Staff Engineer' title and explicit cross-team scope ('influence extends beyond what you ship directly', 'standards you set become the reference point across the organization') support a Staff seniority classification rather than Senior.
Several PostgreSQL internals items (MVCC, autovacuum, WAL, query plan analysis) are listed as distinct required competencies rather than named tools; they are included as skills because they represent concrete, testable technical knowledge gates explicitly called out in the Required Qualifications section.
Aurora PostgreSQL, PgBouncer/PgDog, asyncio/asyncpg, Python async patterns, Rust/Go/C++, and OLAP familiarity all appear under Preferred Qualifications and are marked accordingly.
No degree requirement is stated anywhere in the posting.
Ignored 2 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): query plan analysis, read replica strategy.
Read the full posting
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