We are seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) to design, operate, and improve reliable, scalable, secure, and highly available database and data platforms. The role combines database engineering, site reliability engineering, Linux systems administration, and infrastructure automation.
The ideal candidate will have strong production experience with PostgreSQL, AWS, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and distributed data systems and will work closely with SRE, application, security, and infrastructure teams.
Roles & Responsibilities
- Design, administer, maintain, and secure PostgreSQL environments in production and cloud environments.
- Manage PostgreSQL deployments on Kubernetes and Amazon RDS.
- Perform database administration activities including installation, upgrades, patching, backup/recovery, monitoring, capacity planning, and performance tuning.
- Troubleshoot production issues across application, database, operating system, storage, and network layers.
- Design and maintain ETL pipelines and develop scripts and procedures for data migration.
- Build and automate database and infrastructure operations using Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet.
- Develop operational tooling and automation using Python, Bash, Go, Ruby, or Perl.
- Monitor database health, performance, availability, and capacity and implement improvements.
- Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, alerting, and post-incident reviews.
- Improve reliability practices through SLOs, disaster recovery, backup validation, and failover testing.
- Build database platform tooling and self-service workflows that enable application teams to use data services safely and efficiently.
- Operate and support distributed data systems such as Kafka/MSK, ClickHouse, Redis, MySQL, Cassandra, or Elasticsearch.
- Collaborate with SRE, application engineering, security, and infrastructure teams to drive reliable architectural changes.
- Create technical documentation and design proposals and communicate solutions effectively to engineering stakeholders.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting PostgreSQL in production environments.
- 5+ years managing production databases or distributed data systems across application, database, OS, storage, and network layers.
- Hands-on experience with AWS, Amazon RDS, Kubernetes, Terraform, service discovery, and secrets management.
- 3+ years of Linux systems engineering experience, including performance tuning, memory management, I/O tuning, security, configuration, and networking.
- Experience automating infrastructure or database operations using Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet.
- 2+ years of scripting or programming experience with Python, Bash, Go, Ruby, or Perl.
- Experience working with at least one non-PostgreSQL data platform such as Kafka/MSK, ClickHouse, Redis, MySQL, Cassandra, or Elasticsearch.
- Strong understanding of PostgreSQL internals, including replication, concurrency, transactions, indexing, maintenance, backup/recovery, and query performance.
- Strong troubleshooting, problem-solving, communication, and documentation skills.
Preferred Skills
- Experience building database platform tooling, self-service workflows, and standardized operational processes.
- Experience operating Kafka/MSK, ClickHouse, or Redis at scale, including clustering, replication, partitioning/sharding, retention, capacity planning, and workload tuning.
- Experience defining and improving reliability practices for production data systems.
- Strong knowledge of SLOs, disaster recovery, backup validation, failover, and resilience testing.
- Experience with cloud-native database architectures and distributed systems.
- Ability to create technical design documents and communicate complex database and reliability concepts effectively.
- Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, collaborative engineering environment.