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; Austin, Texas; and New York City, NY (opening Summer 2026).
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 Team
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 at scale. The 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 the one of our offices. If you need to travel to make these meetups, Upstart will cover all travel related expenses.
How you’ll make an impact:
- 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.
What we’re looking for:
Minimum Requirements
- 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.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Clickhouse, DataDog 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 military leave programs
- Annual wellness, technology & ergonomic reimbursement programs
- Social activities including team events and onsites, all-company updates, employee resource groups (ERGs), and other interest groups such as book clubs, fitness, investing, and volunteering
- Catered lunches + snacks & drinks when working in offices
At Upstart, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. The anticipated base salary for this position is expected to be within the below range. Your actual base pay will depend on your geographic location–with our “digital first” philosophy, Upstart uses compensation regions that vary depending on location. Individual pay is also determined by job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
In addition, Upstart provides employees with target bonuses, equity compensation, and generous benefits packages (including medical, dental, vision, and 401k).
Upstart is a proud Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to ensuring that underrepresented classes receive better access to affordable credit, and are just as committed to embracing diversity and inclusion in our hiring practices. We celebrate all cultures, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences, and know that we can only become better together.
If you require reasonable accommodation in completing an application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please email [email protected]
https://www.upstart.com/candidate_privacy_policy
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