Senior Manager, Database Engineering

About Upstart

Upstart is the leading AI lending marketplace partnering with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit. By leveraging Upstart's AI marketplace, Upstart-powered banks and credit unions can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates across races, ages, and genders, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital-first lending experience their customers demand. More than 80% of borrowers are approved instantly, with zero documentation to upload.

Upstart is a digital-first company, which means that most Upstarters live and work anywhere in the United States. However, we also have offices in San Mateo, California;
Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.

Most Upstarters join us because they connect with our mission of enabling access to effortless credit based on true risk. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Upstart, we’d love to hear from you!

The Database Engineering team owns the reliability, performance, and scalability of the database systems that power Upstart’s lending platform. Our environment is built primarily on Postgres and AWS RDS, supporting mission‑critical financial transactions  team develops tooling, automation, and best practices that ensure our databases remain secure, resilient, and efficient as the business grows.

As a Senior Database Engineering Manager
, you’ll lead this team of specialists, helping define the long‑term vision for database engineering at Upstart while ensuring operational excellence today. You’ll partner with product engineering, infrastructure, and data teams to set standards, solve complex scaling challenges, and enable developers across the company to work more effectively with data.

Position Location – This role is available in the following locations:
Remote

Time Zone Requirements – This team operates on the East/West Coast time zones.

Travel Requirements – This team has regular on‑site collaboration sessions. These occur 2-4 days per Quarter at one of our offices. If you need to travel to make these meetups, Upstart will cover all travel related expenses.

• Define the roadmap for database engineering, ensuring our database infrastructure scales with Upstart’s growth.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Database Engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and collaboration.
• Partner with application and data engineering teams to establish standards for database design, schema governance, and query optimization.
• Drive initiatives to improve availability, security, and performance across all production and non‑production database environments.
• Champion automation and tooling that reduce operational overhead, increase observability, and improve developer self‑service.
• Act as a thought partner to engineering leadership on database strategy, scaling, and cost efficiency.

• 3+ years of people and team management experience, and 8+ years of experience in database engineering or DBA roles.
• Deep expertise in Postgres, including extensions, performance tuning, and replication.
• Experience designing and supporting high‑volume OLTP systems.
• Strong background with AWS (RDS, EC2, IAM, VPC, S3) and infrastructure automation.
• Proficiency with Python or another scripting language for database automation and tooling.
• Strong communication skills and proven ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and operations teams.

• Experience with Clickhouse, Data Dog DBM, or other distributed database technologies.
• Familiarity with database scalability solutions in cloud environments.
• Experience in financial services, fintech, or other highly regulated industries.
• Background managing mission‑critical systems with high uptime requirements.

• Competitive Compensation (base + bonus & equity)
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with Health Savings Account contributions from Upstart
• 401(k) with 100% company match up to $4,500 and immediate vesting and after‑tax savings
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Life and disability insurance
• Generous holiday, vacation, sick and safety leave
• Supportive parental, family care, and…