Staff Engineer II - Database Engineering

Location: TX - Dallas/Irving

About the role

As a Staff Engineer II, this role provides expertise across a suite of technical tools and products within a defined domain to ensure solutions are safe, secure, compliant, and reliable. The role identifies development and support needs while taking on design responsibilities in support of project tasks. This individual facilitates dialogue and activities that promote collaboration across teams, including teams outside the immediate domain, and develops effective presentations and narratives for stakeholders.

The Azure Cosmos DBA Engineer is a senior database engineering role responsible for the design, administration, security, governance, performance, and operational support of Azure Cosmos DB and related cloud-native database services, primarily supporting the AI Program. This role serves as a technical authority for Cosmos DB usage across AI workloads, with responsibility for establishing secure access patterns, supporting production readiness, partnering with application and cloud engineering teams, and ensuring database services meet enterprise standards for security, resiliency, recoverability, compliance, and audit readiness. The role helps formalize the operating model for Cosmos DB support, including ownership boundaries between application teams, cloud/platform teams, and the DBA organization. This includes clarifying responsibilities across control-plane and data-plane access, RBAC, shared key usage, managed identities, and enterprise standards.

Responsibilities

• Lead the strategic planning of a project as it relates to technical solution design.
• Design and implement engineering principles aimed at reliability practices and sound recovery procedures.
• Design application-specific performance monitoring metrics that can be captured and shared with business partners.
• Develop and maintain technical documentation, including system configurations, procedures, and desktop procedures, while ensuring compliance with IT policies, procedures, industry standards, and audit expectations.
• Support Azure Cosmos DB capabilities required by AI Program workloads, including AI Agent Memory use cases.
• Collaborate with AI delivery teams to ensure database services are designed for reliability, security, performance, and compliance.
• Provide database engineering guidance for AI-related application patterns, including data access, throughput planning, partitioning strategy, availability, and operational controls.
• Help mature the database support model for AI workloads as adoption expands across the enterprise.

Requirements

• 7+ years of related experience in IT App Support, IT Development, IT Networking, or similar field.
• Bachelor's degree in a related field required.
• Previous leadership experience preferred.
• Intermediate to advanced knowledge of general Financial Services or Banking is preferred.
• Advanced knowledge of applicable regulatory and legal compliance obligations, rules and regulations, industry standards and practices.
• Advanced proven experience in leading cross-functional teams and managing multiple projects simultaneously.
• Additional experience with pipeline development and leveraging Azure DevOps while working on multiple projects simultaneously.
• Advanced ability to see the big picture and align projects with organizational goals. Capable of leading and motivating cross-functional teams.
• Expertise in resolving conflicts and addressing challenges as well as skilled at identifying and mitigating risks at the project level.
• Proficient in governance patterns tied to intake, technical reviews and architectural compliance.
• Advanced speaking and writing communication skills.
• May require up to 25% travel.

Benefits

• Competitive salaries
• Ownership stake in the company
• Medical and dental insurance
• Time off
• 401k matching program
• Tuition assistance program
• Employee volunteer program
• Wellness program
• Opportunity to bolster business knowledge and gain hands-on experience in company operations and financial management

About the company

Western Alliance Bank, Member FDIC, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Alliance Bancorporation. Serving clients nationwide, Western Alliance Bank includes six legacy bank brands — Alliance Association Bank, Alliance Bank of Arizona, Bank of Nevada, Bridge Bank, First Independent Bank and Torrey Pines Bank — that remain part of the company’s heritage, as well as AmeriHome Mortgage, a Western Alliance Bank Company.