Database Engineer / Solutions Architect - (Cape Town)

Cape Town
R&D: Engineering /
Full time /
On-site
WebFX is a proud Google Premier Partner with 6 offices in the US as well as one in Guatemala and another in Cape Town, South Africa! We are continuing to expand worldwide and would love for you to be a part of that! In fact, we doubled in size in the past 5 years and are projecting to once again double in size and be a global, publicly traded tech company by the year 2030 - operating in every continent, servicing clients globally. We currently have talented team members across the globe (representing 18+ Countries) who work full-time and have done so for 10+ years.

No matter where you’re located, we’d love to have you join our mission of providing world-class digital marketing solutions to mid-size businesses on a global scale. We thrive on driving business growth for our clients and are looking for people who take pride in their marketing efforts and enjoy having fun at the same time. Sound like you? Great! Keep reading:

Why Choose WebFX

For 9 years in a row, WebFX has been named the #1 Best Place to Work in Pennsylvania, which is our headquarters’ home state! As a company, we pride ourselves on being able to offer the same culture and benefits to our global team members. In addition to very competitive base pay, we offer company profit-sharing, performance bonuses, and health insurance (including dental, vision, remote doctor, etc.). To aid in your success, we provide world-class digital marketing training (Organic SEO, Local SEO, PPC, Google Analytics + Studio, etc.), long-term career track opportunities, and ongoing learning bonuses (yes, you can get paid to learn!), along with numerous other benefits!

Read below to learn about some of the benefits you can expect when working with WebFX:
- No matter where you are located or your position, WebFX offers long-term stability to all of our FXFamily members. In fact, many of our global team members have been with WebFX for 10+ years, and we’re hoping you can be too! 🌏
- We put our people first; it’s as simple as that. You’re never on your own - when you run into inevitable challenges, we’re there to support you along the way! 
- Long-lasting relationships with both clients and team members due to consistently low turnover rates, which are simply unheard of in our industry because, again, we put our people first.
- When you join WebFX, you don’t just join a company; you join a community! We value all of our team members the same, regardless of their position or where they call home. We truly look forward to learning about you and your background, and we will be there to celebrate the milestones in your life together, no matter how big or small! 👏
- Invitation to our annual FXFest – an all-expenses paid trip for our international team members (with a 1-year tenure) to our company headquarters. The week-long event is filled with activities, learning, and motivation to help unite our U.S. and global staff! 🛫
- Fully equipped in-office setup including computer, dual large monitors, headset, seriously fast internet, generator, and more! 🖥️ 
- Be part of a rapidly growing company that, at the same time, only partners with clients who share our values. 🌱📈
- Unrestricted access to our dozens of proprietary software/platforms our internal R&D team has developed for our team’s exclusive use, in addition to access to the many 3rd party tools and software we utilize internally in order to WOW our clients. You can learn more about just some of our proprietary tools here.
- Merit-based promotional structure.
- Annual merit-based compensation increases! 💰
- We have a very strong commitment to giving back globally - in fact, it’s one of our values here at WebFX. As a member of our FXFamily, you get to be a large part of that simply by achieving your goals - since 2014, we’ve committed to donating globally through our FXBuilds program. You can learn more about that here!

What You'll Get

World-Class Training and Ongoing Career Development

- No matter your level of experience, our “Bootcamp” web marketing training program is provided for all new WebFX “family members” to learn, grow and develop in and out of the office with the hard skills necessary to be successful in their position. 
- From training with our Sr Digital Marketers to access to countless industry-leading online training resources/courses/tutorials to getting experience with nearly 1,500+ different clients with various platforms, digital services, and in every industry you can think of (and then some), our training program is simply unrivaled!
- Training doesn’t stop after your initial training period. We offer career development training and monthly Lunch-and-Learns with our state-of-the-art training amenities to facilitate departmental trainings, industry-related updates, and more!
- FXLearns program – where you get incentives for taking advantage of our countless industry training resources
- After 1,500+ clients, we’ve been able to truly master our processes and procedures – you will be trained on all of those - no need to develop how to do things (unless you want to help us continually improve that process!) – because we refuse to ever stagnate, we are always pushing the envelope to make those processes 1% better too! 

Opportunities for Growth

WebFX grew 250%+ over the past 3 years both locally and globally, and merit-based promotional opportunities are abundant if you're meeting or exceeding position performance metrics. We believe in growing and promoting our internal team first and foremost. In fact, 95% of our promotions are internal! All team members have a very clearly defined progression path, so you know exactly what is expected of you so you can put your career in your own hands. And what’s more, you’re not expected to know it all - we believe in continually striving to be an expert in your subject matter of expertise – so while we will purposely challenge you to grow in SEO/PPC/Google Analytics, we are a full-service agency that has experts in other departments that handle everything else - from link building, social media, web design, and web development. So you can truly master your trade.

Our goal is to hire on 50+ team members over the next 36 months in South Africa, and we've recently opened our office in Cape Town to help us achieve this goal.

What You'll Do

Our database engineer is 70% database expert & 30% software engineer.

You will spend the majority of your time making application changes to improve database performance, scalability and reliability and delivering foundational database solutions and best practices for our backend development teams.

During our call, we can show you a demo of our amazing proprietary platform!

Responsibilities

    • Pro-actively identify database performance impediments and resolve them by proposing and delivering changes to the codebase. Own this process end-to-end, from triaging issues to verifying your solution in production
    • Deliver application changes that allow us to scale the application and its database further and make sure we're prepared for data growth
    • Act as a Database Maintainer for the codebase and review database-related application changes before they are released
    • Review, optimize and refactor the existing database schema
    • Create and incrementally improve documentation to reduce tribal knowledge, including
    • Database best practices
    • Workflows and database team processes
    • Target architecture and long term scalability considerations
    • Improve tooling to detect performance bottlenecks early in the development cycle
    • Work with the Google Cloud Platform (Our platform is on GCP)
    • Identify problematic database patterns by analyzing workload and implementing/suggesting solutions
    • Implement a partitioning strategy framework for large tables
    • Implement building blocks to efficiently load, analyze and migrate data
    • Analyze tables and optimizing them by adding indexes, breaking them up into separate tables, or by removing unnecessary columns
    • Implement an efficient queueing strategy for pull mirrors
    • Implement efficient patterns for counting
    • Rewrite the database queries and related application logic used for retrieving subgroups
    • Prevent primary key integer overflows with no-downtime migrations
    • Improve index usage (remove unused, identify missing)
    • Improve our application-side database load balancing implementation
    • Review database related changes submitted by other developers
    • Document database best practices or patterns to avoid

Who We're Looking For

    • Expert-level understanding of relational databases, SQL and query optimization techniques and demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent performance problems
    • Expert-level understanding of the internals of PostgreSQL
    • Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a remote and largely asynchronous work environment
    • Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions
    • Experience in, and understanding of, data and information management, as it relates to Big Data trends and issues within businesses
    • Experience owning a project from concept to production, including proposal, discussion, and execution.
    • Self-motivated and self-managing, with strong organizational skills.
    • Ability to thrive in a fully remote organization, however with some overlapping hours with the rest of the team

A Plus if you Have

    • Big Data Management experience (this is a huge plus)
    • Knowledge of BigQuery, BigTable, TensorFlow (this is a huge plus) (Our platform is on GCP)
    • Knowledge of BigQuery, BigTable, TensorFlow
    • Experience with PostgreSQL sharding techniques
    • Experience with owning the operations of large PostgreSQL production database infrastructure
    • Experience in a peak performance organization, preferably a tech startup, or high growth platform
    • Experience working the the marketing automation / CRM / B2B software industry
    • Experience working with a remote team
    • Mid to Enterprise software company experience
    • Developer platform/tool industry experience
    • Experience working with a global or otherwise multicultural team
    • Passion for/experience with open source and developer tools
    • Experience with AWS RedShift, Kinesis, BigQuery, GCP Cloud SQL, whatever Azure's big datasets products are, and Data Pipeline
Working Hours
The core position hours will have 4 hours of overlap with our standard Monday through Friday - 8AM EST until 4PM EST/New York Time Zone in order to accommodate our clients' schedules, with additional options to fulfill the full work week within your time zone (Depending on the hours you select, you will receive additional pay for overlapping our hours)

Compensation
Negotiable, based on experience
Annual merit-based increases

Working Hours and Location

We're currently looking for full-time team members who are able to work in our Cape Town office and the hours outlined below.

Office Locations:
Cape Town Office: 114 Bree St, Cape Town City Centre, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

Work Hours:
Monday through Thursday: 10:00 AM -7:30 PM SAST

Friday: 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM SAST


Check out our culture on social media:
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Please submit a resume or CV (in English) to be considered for this opportunity.

*You don't need to apply more than once, even if you're interested in multiple positions - you can simply let us know! We consider all open roles when reviewing resumes and applications! 

WebFX is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to providing and fostering an inclusive environment where all people, including women, minorities, LGBTQ+, and other underrepresented groups, are supported, respected, and encouraged to excel within STEM careers. Our goal as an organization is to empower our team to achieve their personal best, bring people together, and provide equal opportunity to do so regardless of race, age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, physical ability or disability, or political affiliation. You can learn more on our website here!