Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability, availability, recoverability, security, and performance of production database platforms supporting critical business applications.
• Drive operational excellence through proactive monitoring, capacity planning, incident prevention, and continuous improvement of database services.
• Partner with application teams and SREs to diagnose and resolve complex production issues across the application and database stack.
• Design, build, and maintain automation that reduces operational toil, improves consistency, and enables self-service capabilities.
• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code, operational tooling, CI/CD integrations, and reliability-focused engineering practices that improve database and platform operations at scale.
• Provide database expertise during application, platform, and cloud architecture discussions.
• Lead database modernization initiatives, evaluate cloud-native services, and help design scalable, resilient, and secure database solutions across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments.
• Partner with security and compliance teams to implement secure-by-default database capabilities including access controls, encryption, auditing, disaster recovery, backup strategies, and data protection controls.
• Continuously assess and reduce operational and security risks.
• Operate as a trusted database subject matter expert within a swarming-culture engineering organization.
• Mentor peers, participate in incident reviews, contribute to technical standards, and help advance platform reliability practices across IT Platform Engineering and its adjacent teams.

Requirements

• A bachelor's degree and 6 years of professional work experience (or a master's degree and 3 years of professional work experience, or equivalent experience).
• Demonstrated experience in/with Database.
• Deep knowledge of relational database systems, with expert-level proficiency in Microsoft SQL Server administration, performance tuning, troubleshooting, high availability, disaster recovery, and operational management.
• Strong understanding of database architecture, data modeling, indexing strategies, query optimization, capacity planning, and scalability patterns.
• Knowledge of database security principles including access controls, encryption, auditing, compliance, and data protection.
• Understanding of modern cloud database platforms and services, including AWS/RDS, Azure, and hybrid cloud architectures.
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automation, scripting, and platform engineering practices.
• Familiarity with observability concepts including monitoring, alerting, logging, performance analysis, and operational readiness.
• Understanding of software development lifecycle (SDLC), Agile delivery methodologies, DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and developer platform concepts.
• Significant experience operating and supporting production database environments at enterprise scale.
• Demonstrated experience diagnosing and resolving complex reliability and performance issues spanning databases, applications, infrastructure, and cloud services.
• Experience designing and implementing automation to improve reliability, reduce operational toil, and increase platform scalability.
• Experience partnering with application engineers, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), cloud engineers, and security teams to deliver resilient solutions.
• Experience supporting cloud migrations, database modernization initiatives, and hybrid platform environments.

Qualifications

• Systems-thinking mindset focused on reliability, automation, scalability, security, and continuous improvement.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills with the ability to influence technical decisions across organizational boundaries.
• Ability to serve as a trusted database subject matter expert while contributing broadly to team and platform outcomes.