Senior Database Engineer II

Job Overview

We are seeking a Senior Database Engineer to join our dynamic team of 100+ software engineers, designers, project managers, and specialists who are passionate about building innovative, high-quality solutions. Our work spans a wide range of impactful and forward-thinking technologies, including:

• Advanced algorithms for computer-adaptive testing
• Highly scalable, high-performance distributed systems
• Comprehensive learning management systems
• Universally accessible user interfaces
• AI-driven scoring and assessment tools

As a Senior Database Engineer, you will drive the design, development, and optimization of database systems that power mission-critical, high-transaction applications. You will ensure data integrity, performance, and scalability within modern cloud environments and microservice-based architectures. Acting as a Subject Matter Expert (SME), you will collaborate closely with engineering and Dev Ops teams to shape and advance our data architecture and strategy in AWS.

• Develop state of the art database solutions to meet the stringent performance, scalability and integrity needs of high transaction systems
• Design database schema based on data modeling of business requirements and entities
• Development work will involve writing stored procedures, functions, views, triggers, constraints, etc.
• Create deployment and rollback scripts for all database objects manually or auto generated
• Analyze access patterns and propose the best combination of indexes, constraints, foreign keys, and queries
• Troubleshoot performance problems and propose short-term fixes and long-term solutions
• Work with Architects and drive developers in the future evolution of the data layer researching options and developing prototypes before eventual introduction into the tech stack
• Stay current with evolving databases, AWS, microservices, and cloud‑native technologies; prototype new tools/features for adoption.

• B.S. in Computer Science (or related field) and 5+ years related experience or M.S. Degree and 3+yrs of experience.
• 5+ years of hands‑on SQL Server development experience
• Expert knowledge of all aspects of SQL Server including the ability to write and deploy effective triggers, stored procedures and user defined functions
• Authoritative understanding of SQL Server concurrency features, transactions, and locking;
  Excellent data modeling and schema design skills, including normalization and de‑normalization
• Thorough understanding of best practices for database maintenance, including index and file management, backups, failure recovery, database defragmentation, documentation;
  Ability to analyze disk space requirements and hardware utilization, automate error notification
• Basic SQL Server administration skills, such as backups, restores, taking and reverting snapshots, user/role security, access permissions, etc.
• Experience operating SQL Server in AWS:
  Amazon RDS for SQL Server, RDS Custom, or SQL Server on EC2.
• Familiarity with AWS microservices architecture: designing databases to support a microservice‑based application in AWS.
• Experience optimizing data access from microservices (e.g. minimizing cross‑service latency, designing efficient APIs, minimizing coupling).
• Knowledge of containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes, AWS ECS/EKS) in microservices context.

When you work with Cambium Assessment, you’ll be helping to design and build inspiring solutions that make a real impact on the online testing industry, as well as the educators and students we support.

• Our systems are highly scaled and mission critical serving over a third of all students in grades 3-8 in the United States.
• Our web applications are highly interactive and universally accessible.
• Our machine scoring methods are driven by artificial intelligence allowing computers to perform such complex operations as grading essays with more accuracy than humans.
• Our processes use intensive algorithmic computing allowing a customized experience for each student as the exam adapts real-time based upon answers given.

In the 2024 school year, we delivered more than 126 million online tests, and successfully…