We're building one of the great wonders of the Web, the kind of public
works project -- like Wikipedia or web.archive.org or IMDb -- that
becomes a touchstone for Web users. And from day one, we've got a
database with hundreds of millions of rows. Luckily, we've also got a
sysadmin team that thinks in terms of petabytes, so we'll have plenty
of machines to distribute things across.
The ideal candidate will have deep experience keeping PostgreSQL up
and tuned, know how to tweak table schemas for best performance, and
have experience doing master-slave replication (e.g. with slony).
Plus, you'll have experience doing distributed processing and calling
PostgreSQL from the Python world, so you can build an API that
intelligently distributes requests across machines (we're currently
planning to use a partitioned SQL model, where each machine only
stores one portion of the database) and caches the results.
We're a nonprofit, so we can't pay quite as well as some big valley
companies, but we make up for it by having a really thrilling project,
the satisfaction of knowing you're doing something important, and the
freedom to have all your code released as free/open source software.
And we're flexible about where you work from (we're in San Francisco).
If you're interested, email databaser@aaronsw.com with what you've done.