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Senior Database Reliability Engineer (PostgreSQL)

Medallia · McLean, VA · 5 days ago
On-siteEngineering$90k–$120k/yrFull-time

About the role

Medallia is the pioneer and market leader in Experience Management, offering the award‑winning SaaS platform Medallia Experience Cloud that manages experiences, insights, and actions for candidates, customers, employees, patients, and residents. The Database Services team owns the production database systems that power a highly reliable global SaaS platform. Database Reliability Engineers (DBREs) work as peers to Site Reliability Engineering, ensuring availability, performance, and lifecycle of PostgreSQL (the largest part of the estate) and emerging technologies such as YugabyteDB and Apache Cassandra, primarily in Kubernetes environments hosted in Medallia Cloud.

We are seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer with deep PostgreSQL expertise and an automation mindset. The role involves hands‑on production work—operating clusters, diagnosing incidents, tuning performance, executing upgrades—and turning repeatable procedures into automation the team relies on. Senior DBREs lead incident reviews, define service objectives, and mentor other DBREs.

Responsibilities

  • Own the availability and performance of production PostgreSQL clusters, measured against defined service level objectives.
  • Own the database lifecycle: provisioning, configuration, maintenance, major‑version upgrades, scaling, and decommissioning.
  • Own backup, recovery, replication, and high availability, including regular restore tests and failover drills against agreed recovery point and recovery time objectives.
  • Manage capacity planning and growth of the PostgreSQL estate.
  • Build monitoring and alerting that reflects symptoms and service objectives rather than individual failures, and keep operational noise low.
  • Build production‑quality automation, tooling, and services that replace recurring manual procedures across the database lifecycle.
  • Build standardized, supported workflows and self‑service capabilities so engineering teams can provision and operate databases with less direct DBRE involvement.
  • Collaborate with product‑engineering teams: review schema migrations and query patterns, and guide them on PostgreSQL best practices.
  • Troubleshoot complex problems that span the database, operating system, network, and application layers.
  • Lead incident response for database systems, followed by blameless root‑cause analysis and permanent corrective actions.
  • Use AI‑assisted engineering tools where they accelerate troubleshooting, automation, and documentation.
  • Mentor other DBREs and review technical work.
  • Maintain runbooks and documentation that others can follow and progressively automate.
  • Be part of the Database Services on‑call rotation and planned maintenance windows.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience running PostgreSQL in large‑scale production or SaaS environments.
  • Demonstrated technical knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, including MVCC, vacuum, WAL, locking, concurrency, and query planning.
  • Production experience managing PostgreSQL database operations, including:
    • Capacity planning.
    • Backup, point‑in‑time recovery, and restore validation.
    • Replication and high availability.
    • Major‑version upgrades.
    • Indexing, SQL tuning, partitioning, and performance tuning.
    • Schema migrations, and reviewing query changes for production impact.
    • Incident response and root‑cause analysis for customer‑facing production systems.
  • Experience collaborating with cross‑functional engineering teams.
  • Availability to participate in on‑call rotations and scheduled maintenance windows.
  • Fluency in English, both spoken and written.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience operating PostgreSQL at scale, such as multi‑terabyte databases or fleets of hundreds of clusters.
  • Designing and automating partitioning schemes for high‑volume tables.
  • Experience with Patroni or a comparable PostgreSQL HA stack in production.
  • Connection pooling and load balancing for PostgreSQL, such as PgBouncer or equivalent.
  • Zero‑ or near‑zero‑downtime operations on production PostgreSQL, including schema migrations, partitioning of multi‑terabyte tables, and cross‑cluster migrations.
  • Zero‑ or near‑zero‑downtime major‑version upgrades using logical replication, pg_upgrade, or similar.
  • Running PostgreSQL clusters in Kubernetes or other containerized environments.
  • Linux OS fundamentals.
  • CI/CD and GitOps tools such as Jenkins and ArgoCD.
  • Infrastructure‑as‑code and configuration management using Ansible.
  • Building automation, tooling, or services used in production using Python.
  • Observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or OpenTelemetry.
  • Public cloud platforms, particularly OCI.
  • Experience with YugabyteDB or Apache Cassandra.

Benefits

  • Competitive health and wellness benefits, including medical, dental, vision.
  • 401(k) plan.
  • Short‑term and long‑term disability.
  • Life and AD&D insurance.
  • Statutory leaves.
  • Paid parental leave.
  • Paid holidays.

Pay

The annual base salary range for this position is $90,000 - $120,000.

Schedule

This is a hybrid role requiring 3 days per week onsite; candidates based in the Tysons Corner vicinity will be prioritized.

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