Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE)

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Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) 

Experience Level: Mid–Senior (4+ years PostgreSQL experience)

About the Role

We are looking for a highly skilled Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) with deep expertise in PostgreSQL at scale and solid experience with MySQL. In this role, you will design, operationalize, and optimize the data persistence layer that powers our large-scale, mission-critical systems. You will work closely with SRE, Platform, and Engineering teams to ensure performance, reliability, automation, and operational excellence across our database environment.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building resilient data infrastructure, not just administering it.

Responsibilities:

Architecture, Reliability & Performance

• Design, implement, and operate highly available PostgreSQL clusters (physical replication, logical replication, sharding/partitioning, failover automation).
• Optimize query performance, indexing strategies, schema design, and storage engines.
• Perform capacity planning, growth forecasting, and workload modeling.
• Own high-availability strategies including automatic failover, multi-AZ/multi-region setups, and disaster recovery.

Automation & Tooling

• Develop automation for any and all tasks including but not limited to: provisioning, configuration, backups, failovers, vacuum tuning, and schema management using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes Operators, or custom tooling.
• Build monitoring, alerting, and self-healing systems for PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Operations & Incident Response

• Lead response during database incidents—performance regressions, replication lag, deadlocks, bloat issues, storage failures, etc.
• Conduct root-cause analysis and implement permanent fixes.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with software engineers to review SQL, optimize schemas, and ensure efficient use of PostgreSQL features.
• Provide guidance on database-related design patterns, migrations, version upgrades, and best practices.

Required Qualifications

• 4 plus  years of hands-on PostgreSQL experience in high-volume, distributed, or large-scale production environments.
• Strong knowledge of PostgreSQL internals (WAL, MVCC, bloat/ vacuum tuning, query planner, indexing, logical replication).
• Production experience with MySQL (InnoDB internals, replication, performance tuning).
• Advanced SQL and strong understanding of schema design and query optimization.
• Experience with Linux systems, networking fundamentals, and systems troubleshooting.
• Experience building automation with Go or Python.
• Production experience with monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, PMM, pg_stat_statements, etc.).
• Hands-on experience with cloud environments (AWS or GCP).

Preferred/Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with PgBouncer, HAProxy, or other connection-pooling/load-balancing layers.
• Exposure to event streaming (Kafka, Debezium) and change data capture.
• Experience supporting 24/7 production environments with on-call rotation.
• Contributions to open-source PostgreSQL ecosystem.

This position requires the ability to access federal environments and/or have access to protected federal data.  As a condition of employment for this position, the successful candidate must be able to submit documentation establishing U.S. Person status (e.g. a U.S. Citizen, National, Lawful Permanent Resident, Refugee, or Asylee. 22 CFR 120.15) upon hire.

Requires in-person onboarding and travel to our San Francisco, CA HQ office or our Chicago office during the first week of employment.

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Okta is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, or status as a protected veteran. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and convictions records, consistent with applicable laws.
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