Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. QuidelOrtho is a leading in vitro diagnostics company formed by the merger of Quidel Corporation and Ortho Clinical Diagnostics. They are seeking a Senior Database Design Engineer to serve as the subject matter expert for relational database design and tuning for Linux-based medical devices, ensuring long-term maintainability and regulatory compliance throughout the product lifecycle.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the database architecture owner for PostgreSQL or equivalent database instances embedded within medical devices running Linux on workstation-class hardware
- Design relational schemas, views, indexes, and constraints that balance performance, maintainability, and regulatory traceability
- Own and maintain the database design over time, including governance of schema changes, technical debt management, documentation, and coordination of design evolution across releases
- Act as the central design authority for how multiple software components read from and write to shared database resources
- Design database interfaces and usage patterns that minimize the need for future migrations, while still enabling safe, versioned evolution when required
- Lead query optimization and performance tuning, including execution plan analysis, indexing strategy, and long-term capacity planning
- Define standards for database versioning, migration strategy, and backward compatibility suitable for regulated, fielded systems
- Collaborate with system architects, middleware developers, and UI teams to ensure database access patterns are well-defined, testable, and stable
- Provide technical leadership in design reviews related to data modeling, persistence strategy, and cross-process communication via the database
- Support backup, restore, and recovery strategies appropriate for on-device databases in production medical equipment
- Participate in requirements, architecture, design, verification, and validation activities within a regulated quality management system (FDA, IEC 62304, ISO 13485)
- Perform other work-related duties as assigned
Skills
- B.S. or M.S. Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related discipline required
- Minimum of 5 years required with bachelor's or 3 years with master's degree, preferably leading in a medical device environment or equivalent combination of education and experience
- Demonstrated expertise in designing and evolving relational schemas; optimizing queries through execution plan analysis; and defining indexing, view, and data-access layers that support multiple consumers
- Experience supporting on-device or embedded databases, where the database runs locally on a deployed system rather than as a managed cloud service
- Strong understanding of data evolution strategies, including migrations, versioned schemas, and backward compatibility
- Experience working in regulated or safety-critical environments (medical devices strongly preferred)
- Working knowledge of C++ or similar programming language sufficient to collaborate with application developers and review database interaction code
- Strong analytical skills and ability to reason about system-wide performance and data integrity tradeoffs
- Ability to travel 5% or less, domestically
- Experience tuning databases for non-cloud, appliance-style deployments
- Familiarity with Linux-based embedded or semi-embedded systems (Yocto, Ubuntu, or similar)
- Experience designing database schemas that support concurrent access by multiple services or processes
- Knowledge of database migration tools and strategies suitable for deployed products with limited upgrade windows
- Prior experience executing database migrations (including planning, risk mitigation, validation, and rollback) and applying lessons learned to improve future migration practices
- Familiarity with scripting or automation (SQL, Python, Bash) for diagnostics, profiling, and maintenance tooling
- Understanding of observability concerns related to databases (logging, metrics, tracing)
- Experience collaborating across software, systems, quality, and regulatory teams
Benefits
- Bonus eligible
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Life insurance
- Disability insurance
- 401(k) plan
- Employee assistance program
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Paid time off (including sick time)
- Paid Holidays
Company Overview