During the past few decades, the role of the Postgres Database Administrator (DBA) has evolved significantly, giving rise to the "Database Platform Engineer." This role emphasizes building developer-owned database tooling, and managing/optimizing databases as a cohesive fleet. Across my last several jobs, I have contributed to & led several database platform teams, and managed Postgres for a wide range of projects. In this talk, I will share Postgres database platform engineering "best practices" refined through my experience at companies of varying size, level of engineering maturity, and data scale. These best practices focus on a wide range of technical and human-focused topics, including: * Metadata management * Logging & migration Postgres configurations * Networking/DNS * The role of databases in a microservice world * The advantages vs risks of a "self-service" infra platform * Maintaining quality of schema design & access patterns when your team doesn't own data