Lead Database Reliability Engineer – Small Business Technologies

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Missouri.

📋 Description

• Take full responsibility for the reliability of essential database systems, focusing on availability, performance, and durability.

• Establish and uphold Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for database services.

• Lead the response to incidents and conduct root cause analyses for database outages.

• Design and implement strategies for failover, replication, and disaster recovery.

• Automate the processes for database provisioning, scaling, backups, and recovery.

• Apply Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and GitOps methodologies in database environments.

• Enhance operational efficiency by minimizing manual work through tooling and self-service options.

• Develop and implement reliability engineering practices, including error budgets, postmortems, and continuous improvement initiatives.

• Create and maintain observability for databases, including metrics, logs, and traces.

• Monitor system health proactively and identify performance bottlenecks.

• Optimize query performance, indexing strategies, and resource usage.

• Develop capacity planning and forecasting models.

• Collaborate with platform engineering to standardize database patterns and tools.

• Support cloud-native database architectures, including managed services and distributed systems.

• Assess and recommend database technologies and storage solutions.

• Ensure systems are designed for resilience, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.

• Manage backup strategies, validation processes, and restore testing.

• Lead planning and preparedness activities for disaster recovery.

• Ensure data integrity, consistency, and adherence to governance standards.

• Collaborate with engineering teams to enhance data access patterns and reliability.

• Work with security and compliance teams to address data protection requirements.

• Influence application design to align with best practices in database reliability.

• Serve as the technical lead for database reliability across various teams.

• Establish standards, best practices, and operational models for Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE).

• Spearhead cross-team initiatives aimed at improving reliability and mitigating systemic risk.

• Mentor senior engineers and contribute to talent development initiatives.

⛳️ Requirements

• 8 to 12+ years of experience in database engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or infrastructure engineering.

• Hands-on expertise with production-grade relational and/or NoSQL databases, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and DynamoDB.

• Experience managing systems at scale within cloud environments like AWS, Azure, or GCP.

• Proven track record of owning high-availability, mission-critical systems.

• Strong understanding of database internals, replication, recovery mechanisms, performance tuning, optimization techniques, distributed systems, and fault-tolerant architectures.

• Proficient with observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana), automation tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines), and containerization/orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).

• Familiar with data lifecycle management and storage optimization strategies.

• Demonstrated capability to lead through influence in cross-functional settings.

• Strong skills in incident management and problem-solving under pressure.

• Ability to articulate complex technical concepts to leadership stakeholders.

• Experience in defining engineering standards and operational practices.

🏝️ Benefits

• Eligible associates can enroll themselves and/or their qualifying dependents in medical and prescription drug coverage.

• Participate in the H&R Block Retirement Savings Plan (401(k) Plan).

• Access to an Employee Assistance Program.

• (Virtual) fitness center programs available.

• Associate discount program for various services.

• Automatically enrolled in Business Travel Accident Insurance.

• Benefit from the Associate Tax Prep program.