Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Role overview Own the reliability, performance, and growth of a multi-service data platform as engineering teams and traffic expand. This senior individual contributor role combines database engineering, infrastructure resilience, developer guidance, and incident response, with an emphasis on making data changes safe and predictable.

Responsibilities - Review ORM-driven schema changes for lock risks, backfills, index builds, and constraint safety; identify inefficient queries and improve schema and access patterns. - Tune PostgreSQL performance and plan capacity, zero-downtime migrations, backups, recovery, and multi-zone resilience across the data tier. - Operate a change-data pipeline into a cloud data warehouse, maintaining replication, schema compatibility, file layout, and downstream reliability. - Build migration checks, query monitoring, dashboards, and review automation that help engineering teams spot risky patterns early. - Support search, caching, and messaging systems through indexing, queue design, failure handling, and load management. - Document operating standards, mentor engineers, and participate in data-tier incident response and postmortems.

Requirements - Strong production PostgreSQL skills, including query plans, MVCC, vacuuming, bloat, and lock contention; managed PostgreSQL experience is preferred. - Fluency with a web framework ORM and ability to reason about generated SQL, eager loading, projections, and query performance. - Practical experience designing single-region, multi-zone systems and understanding their resilience limits. - Production change-data capture experience, ideally with a managed database migration service, logical replication, schema evolution, and a data lake or warehouse. - Experience with database monitoring and cloud logging or metrics, plus at least one production message broker. - Ability to automate in Python, Go, or a similar language and manage infrastructure with Terraform; clear design writing and cross-team collaboration are expected.

Nice to have Experience with event sourcing, alternative change-data tools, connection pooling, observability service-level objectives, warehouse ingestion, rapid infrastructure growth, or compliance programs.

Benefits and work setup The role is hybrid in San Francisco, with three office days weekly, or remote for candidates based permanently in Pacific time. Full-time employees receive equity, health, dental and vision coverage, a retirement plan, flexible paid time off, paid parental leave, and annual funds for work, learning, or wellness. San Francisco employees also receive a commuter benefit.