Kontur is looking to hire Database Engineers for our growing work-from-home team.

Kontur is a US-based geospatial data and real-time risk management solutions provider for humanitarian, private, and governmental organizations.

For many regions across the globe, natural disasters are not just news headlines – they are the reality of life. We are helping companies, governments, and communities reduce the impact of natural disasters and provide help and resources to those who need them the most.

Duties and responsibilities

Most of our data services are backed with on-premises Postgres databases. For object storage, we currently use Amazon S3, which we need to re-evaluate for air gapped on-premises usage.

You will be working alongside the team of Geospatial Data Engineers knowledgeable in PostGIS, core developers of PostGIS, h3, GEOS and other geospatial libraries, and infrastructure engineers responsible for the rest of k8s cluster.

The company endorses GitOps and infrastructure as code techniques. We currently utilize PGO as a way to manage the database in k8s. Your key responsibilities will include improving backup and restore processes, keeping up the SLA, maintaining our custom Postgres packages, and building resilient data processing pipelines.

You will be helping backend engineers with query performance, and fine tune the database settings to the actual usage profile.

In the long-term plan, this role includes experimentation with technologies that can boost performance and scalability of our solutions even more (PG-Strom, NEON).

We strive to keep as much of our platform as possible Open Source, and fix the issues in the upstream projects. You can have a look at some code at our github: https://github.com/konturio.

Our current technology stack includes:

• Self-hosted Kubernetes clusters.
• Grafana, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Zabbix, ELK.
• Apps built using Java 11-17, Spring Boot, Go, Python, Postgres+PostGIS, GNU Make and Nginx.

Why would you want to join?

Possibilities to learn and develop. This position allows you to deploy a broad set of skills that you constantly refine due to the new challenges you solve daily.

You will be helping people. Our solutions are already being used by organizations, such as Pacific Disaster Center, Beacon NGO, and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, in cases of real-life natural and human-made disasters. Knowing that the feature you have been working on saves lives is priceless.

Unmatched expertise. You will work alongside seasoned tech visionaries, engineers, and tech leaders with decades of experience.

Flexibility. We believe that we can perform at our best only in a comfortable and safe environment. Enjoy the flexibility of remote working while the healthy and friendly atmosphere in the company is something we truly value.

Things we seek

• Strong Linux background.
• Understanding of storage subsystems (LVM, tmpfs, bcache, EBS).
• Understanding how to successfully run and scale the database in k8s (PGO).
• Understanding of contemporary server hardware (NUMA, NVMe, GPGPU).
• Proficient knowledge of SQL. 
• Understanding of performance monitoring and debugging tools (perf_events, gdb).
• Good scripting knowledge (Python, Bash) and understanding of SDLC.
• Desire to learn new technologies.
• Proficiency in spoken and written English with good communication skills.

Things that will set you apart

• Proficient knowledge of PostGIS.
• Prior back-end development experience.
• Experience building GPU-accelerated database clusters.
• Experience building and maintaining on-premises object storages (ceph, rook and the others).