Yaw Boateng
Summary
Senior Cloud Database Engineer with 10+ years of experience designing, upgrading, tuning, and operating high-performance PostgreSQL environments across AWS and Azure cloud platforms. Deep expertise in PostgreSQL internals, MVCC, WAL architecture, autovacuum tuning, replication, HA/DR design, and performance engineering for enterprise production workloads.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Senior Cloud Database Engineer
Aflac (Contract)
05.2025 - 01.2026
- Responsible for managing and suporting over 100 AWS RDS PostgreSQL and RDS SQL Server as well as across all environments
- Installed and Supported AWS RDS PostgreSQL infrastructure supporting benefits application databases across all environments.
- Led planning, coordinated and performed RDS PostgreSQL upgrades of databases for version 16 to Postgres 18 with near zero-downtime
- Implemented automated backup and restore validation workflows ensuring DR readiness.
- Diagnosed performance incidents using query plan analysis, workload metrics, and database activity monitoring.
- Implemented monitoring using AWS CloudWatch and Performance Insights.
- Led and supported On-prem SQL server migration to RDS SQL Server from version 2019 to 2022
Principal PostgreSQL Database Engineer
UnitedHealth Group – OptumRX
09.2023 - 04.2025
- Administered PostgreSQL clusters across AWS RDS, Aurora, and on-prem environments supporting multi-terabyte datasets.
- Led PostgreSQL major upgrades from 11 → 13 → 14 using pg_upgrade and replication strategies.
- Designed cross-region disaster recovery environments replicating production clusters across AWS regions.
- Implemented automated backup verification pipelines and restore testing procedures.
- Conducted deep performance tuning using pg_stat_statements, execution plan analysis, and query refactoring.
- Resolved lock contention, replication lag, inefficient indexes, and long-running query issues.
- Built automation tooling to monitor WAL generation, replication health, and slow queries.
Senior PostgreSQL Database Engineer
Comcast (Contract)
03.2023 - 09.2023
- Developed stored procedures, functions, and triggers in PL/pgSQL to automate business logic, enforce data integrity rules, and support backend microservices processing millions of daily transactions.
- Built advanced SQL queries involving CTEs, window functions, recursive queries, and JSONB processing, improving reporting performance and reducing application-side processing.
- Implemented error handling, transaction control, and exception logging in PL/pgSQL procedures to ensure reliable execution of batch jobs and ETL workflows.
- Responsible for data modeling and schema design of Postgresql Databases
- Designed logical and physical data models for enterprise applications using third normal form (3NF) and dimensional modeling techniques.
- Created and maintained PostgreSQL schemas supporting highly relational datasets containing billions of records, ensuring proper use of primary keys, foreign keys, constraints, and indexing strategies.
- Designed star and snowflake schemas for analytics platforms supporting data warehouse workloads
- Optimized PostgreSQL schemas and indexes supporting high-traffic applications.
- Supported PostgreSQL version upgrades and database patching across environments.
Senior PostgreSQL Database Engineer
Yahoo (Contract)
03.2022 - 03.2023
- Deployed and upgraded PostgreSQL versions 9.x to 16 across on-prem and AWS RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL environments
- Configured Patroni-based high availability clusters with etcd and streaming replication. - Implemented logical replication and pg_upgrade for zero-downtime migrations
- Developed automated backup, PITR, and retention strategies using pgBackRest
- Tuned PostgreSQL using pg_stat_statements, auto_explain, and pg_partman
- Enforced RBAC, SSL/TLS encryption, and enabled pgAudit for compliance and logging
- Automated cluster provisioning, patching, and monitoring with Ansible and Bash. - Integrated monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog, and custom alert scripts. - Collaborated with developers for query optimization and schema design. - Led migrations of PostgreSQL to AWS with
- Diagnosed production database incidents and implemented query optimization improvements.
- Implemented monitoring frameworks improving database reliability and observability.
Cloud PostgreSQL DBA
ChenMed
08.2020 - 02.2022
- Managed PostgreSQL clusters across AWS RDS and Aurora and EC2 infrastructure.
- Responsible for managing user access Engineered secure access management for critical PostgreSQL application DBs on RDS by implementing layered RBAC models leveraging IAM-based authentication
- Diagnosed and optimized slow queries on Postgresql instances by analyzing pg_stat_statements and execution plans, reducing average query latency
- Tasked with doing a deep analysis of pg_stat_statements, pg_buffercache, and query execution plans to identify excessive disk I/O and buffer cache misses during large batch insert and transformation operations.
- Implemented streaming replication architectures for high availability.
- Built automated alerting pipelines monitoring WAL growth, replication lag, connection saturation, and disk utilization, reducing database incidents and response time
- Built CI/CD pipelines for database deployments using Jenkins and Liquibase, enabling automated schema changes to support microservices architecture.
- Developed automation scripts using Python and Bash to manage PostgreSQL DBA maintenance and change tasks across to reducing manual workload for entire DBA team
PostgreSQL Database Administrator
Leidos
09.2016 - 06.2020
- Administered PostgreSQL production environments across development and production systems.
- Implemented efficient backup and recovery strategies, achieving a 99.5% data recovery success rate during simulated disasters.
- Wrote shell script to automate database full and incremental backups uisng pg_basebackup and wal_archive for PITR
- Managed a database cluster with over 100 terabytes of data, maintaining 99.9% uptime
- Tuned queries and indexing strategies to improve performance.
- Performed upgrades from PostgreSQL 9.4 → 9.5 → 10.
- Tuned PostgreSQL performance parameters (shared_buffers, work_mem, effective_cache_size, checkpoint_completion_target) across 50 production servers, to improve system throughput and performance
- Responsible for configuring and managing large-scale partitioned tables (up to 1 TB each) using native PostgreSQL partitioning leveraging pg_partman
- Supported MySQL databases and responsible for performance optimization and data refresh
Education
Bachelor of Science -
Mansfield University of Pennsylvania
Mansfield, PA12-2014
Skills
- Designed and operated high-availability PostgreSQL environments across AWS RDS, Aurora PostgreSQL, and Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server
- Led PostgreSQL major version upgrades across environments (96 → 12 and 14 → 18)
- Engineered cross-regional disaster recovery architectures leveraging Aurora Postgres
- Performed deep database performance engineering using Explain Analyze , query refactoring, and indexing
- Installed and Configured monitoring for PostgreSQL Databases using Solarwinds, PMM for On-prem and Cloud Watch for RDS and Aurora
- Diagnosed and resolved production database incidents including bloating, high waits, replication lag, and long runningqueries
- Architecture: MVCC, WAL, Autovacuum tuning, Query planner optimization, Partitioning, Index strategies (B-Tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN)
- Replication: Streaming replication, Logical replication for On-Prem and Cross-region DR, Multi-AZ deployments forCloud
- Performance: EXPLAIN ANALYZE, pg_stat_activity, pg_stat_statements, Query optimization
- Backup & Recovery: pg_dump, pg_basebackup, PITR recovery, automated backup validation
- Cloud Platforms: AWS RDS PostgreSQL, Aurora PostgreSQL, Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server
- Automation: Python, Shell scripting, Terraform, Jenkins, CloudWatch, Grafana
Certification
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Timeline
Senior Cloud Database Engineer
Aflac (Contract)
05.2025 - 01.2026
Principal PostgreSQL Database Engineer
UnitedHealth Group – OptumRX
09.2023 - 04.2025
Senior PostgreSQL Database Engineer
Comcast (Contract)
03.2023 - 09.2023
Senior PostgreSQL Database Engineer
Yahoo (Contract)
03.2022 - 03.2023
Cloud PostgreSQL DBA
ChenMed
08.2020 - 02.2022
PostgreSQL Database Administrator
Leidos
09.2016 - 06.2020
Bachelor of Science -
Mansfield University of Pennsylvania