Staff Software Engineer, PostgreSQL

The posting, as Beacon Biosignals wrote it

Beacon Biosignals is transforming precision medicine for the brain, from clinical development to clinical care. For Life Sciences partners, we offer the leading at-home EEG platform for clinical development of novel therapeutics for neurological, psychiatric, and sleep disorders. Our Diagnostics business is building the most comprehensive at-home platform for precision diagnostics, combining EEG and cardiopulmonary signals to deliver reimbursable assessments for sleep and central nervous system disorders. Together, we're changing the way patients are diagnosed and treated for any disorder that affects brain physiology.

Beacon Biosignals is seeking a Software Engineer IV to join our Datastore team. The Datastore sits at the heart of Beacon's platform. It defines our foundational data model and serves as the centralized repository and API for brain data collected from clinical studies, supporting the analytical tools, services, and applications used by our scientists, clinicians, and partners.

This role emphasizes the design and scaling of backend systems for data infrastructure: PostgreSQL data models, Kafka-driven event pipelines, and the GraphQL API that makes scientific and clinical data usable - distinct from frontend development or end-user product surfaces. At this level you will lead the design of complex systems within the Datastore rather than individual components, own the pipelines that deliver dataset snapshots into our warehouse, and collaborate across platform, application and scientific teams to implement APIs that unlock new workflows in Beacon's expanding portfolio of clinical studies and digital health products.

You should have experience writing complex SQL queries by hand, and should be prepared to reason about schema design, indexes, and query behavior as a matter of course.

Two properties of our system that shape our work may influence your application. Our GraphQL API is generated from the PostgreSQL schema using PostGraphile, so a schema decision is an API decision. Secondly, row-level security is in force on effectively every table, because clinical data from different studies and partners shares one schema, with some rows shared for access by multiple internal teams. RLS predicates get injected into your queries, which makes reasoning about query plans genuinely harder here than it is in most places. If that sounds interesting rather than tedious, you'll enjoy this team.

We are hiring two engineers into this role, with two different centers of gravity. One will focus on the breadth of the Datastore: the event pipelines, the GraphQL API, core data models, and third-party integrations. The other will focus on depth in PostgreSQL (data modeling, performance tuning, operations) and supporting all engineers in developing schemas and the access controls that protect clinical data. The core requirements are the same. Tell us which one you are most drawn to in your application.

This role is 100% remote from anywhere in
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For the PostgreSQL & Data Modeling role

• You can be the person the rest of the team comes to about the database.
• Deep PostgreSQL: you reason fluently about the query planner, index selection, and EXPLAIN (ANALYZE), and why a query that should be fast isn't
• Data modeling: you design the schema itself: entities, relationships, and the constraints that make invalid states impossible. Including how to model time, since clinical results get re-scored and corrected and we need to answer "what did this look like when the report was signed?"
• Schema evolution under load: zero-downtime migrations, dual-write transitions, lock avoidance, backfill and verification. Our schema has hundreds of migrations behind it and will have hundreds more
• Operating PostgreSQL in production, not only designing for it: upgrades, replication, backup and restore, connection pooling, bloat and vacuum behaviour, extensions
• Making others good at it: you teach, review, and document, because a schema only stays coherent if the team understands it

We don't expect every candidate to check every box. If you bring strong fundamentals, care about data infrastructure for health, and are excited to learn, we’d love to hear from you!

The US-based salary range for this role is $170,000 – $190,000. Salary ranges are determined using current market compensation data for this role and adjusted based on experience, skills, and location. The base salary is one component of the total compensation package, which includes equity, PTO and other benefits.

At Beacon, we've found that cultural and scientific impact is driven most by those that lead by example. As such, we're always seeking new contributors whose work demonstrates an avid curiosity, a bias towards simplicity, an eye for composability, a self-service mindset, and - most of all - a deep empathy towards colleagues, stakeholders, users, and patients. We believe a diverse team builds more robust systems and achieves higher impact.