Senior Database Reliability Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Design, develop, and maintain shared database platform components utilized by Sezzle applications, including database connection packages, client libraries, migration tools, safety checks, query standards, and abstractions for developers.

• Create reliable and scalable methods for Sezzle services to connect to and interact with relational databases across production, staging, and development environments.

• Collaborate with backend engineering teams to enhance database usage within application code, focusing on connection lifecycle, transaction management, retries, timeouts, pooling, query patterns, and migration workflows.

• Develop automation and internal tools that ensure safer, more repeatable database operations with reduced manual intervention.

• Establish and uphold engineering standards for database access, schema design, migrations, indexing, query performance, connection management, and operational readiness.

• Architect and enhance database infrastructure across AWS RDS/Aurora MySQL, PostgreSQL, RDS Proxy, read replicas, backups, failover, parameter groups, monitoring, and capacity planning.

• Lead initiatives aimed at improving database reliability, minimizing operational risk, enhancing performance, and enabling scalable growth for Sezzle.

• Evaluate application designs and database modifications early in the development process to ensure reliability, scalability, maintainability, and security are integrated from the outset.

• Establish guardrails for database migrations, including automated checks, rollback expectations, schema review workflows, migration observability, and production safety measures.

• Enhance developer self-service capabilities for database provisioning, access, schema management, local development, testing, and observability.

• Analyze production database issues by integrating application telemetry, database metrics, logs, query plans, traces, and cloud infrastructure data.

• Diagnose and resolve systemic database issues rather than just addressing the symptoms, such as poor access patterns, unsafe migrations, inefficient queries, connection storms, lock contention, replication lag, and capacity constraints.

• Develop and maintain meaningful dashboards, alerts, SLOs, SLIs, runbooks, and operational readiness checks for database-supported services.

• Propel enhancements in database backup validation, restore testing, disaster recovery, failover preparedness, and business continuity.

• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to strengthen database access controls, auditability, encryption, secrets management, least privilege principles, and PCI/SOC 2 compliant measures.

• Mentor engineers on database design, query performance, safe migrations, operational readiness, and debugging in production environments.

• Utilize automation and AI tools where applicable to enhance migration reviews, query analysis, incident investigation, documentation, and developer productivity.

⛳️ Requirements

• 6+ years of professional experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, database engineering, SRE, or platform engineering.

• Strong software engineering skills in at least one production programming language such as Go, Python, or TypeScript.

• Demonstrated ability to create production-quality internal tools, libraries, frameworks, services, or platform components for use by other engineers.

• Extensive hands-on experience with relational databases, particularly MySQL and/or PostgreSQL, in high-availability production settings.

• In-depth understanding of how application code interacts with databases, including connection pooling, transactions, isolation levels, retries, timeouts, deadlocks, locking, migrations, and query execution.

• Experience in designing or enhancing shared database access patterns, internal database packages, ORM wrappers, migration frameworks, or developer-facing database tools.

• Practical experience with AWS RDS/Aurora, encompassing provisioning, upgrades, replicas, backups, failover, monitoring, parameter tuning, and troubleshooting in production.

• Familiarity with database connection management technologies like RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, ProxySQL, or application-level pooling.

• Strong analytical skills for assessing database performance through query plans, indexes, slow query logs, wait events, locks, metrics, and application traces.

• Experience in designing safe database migration processes for production systems.

• Solid understanding of observability for database-backed applications, including metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, alerting, and incident response.

• Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD systems such as Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Kubernetes, Helm, or similar tools.

• Ability to influence engineering teams through clear design reviews, documentation, technical standards, and practical implementation.

• Capacity to work independently, identify significant issues, propose practical solutions, and drive them to completion.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health insurance

• Professional development opportunities

• Remote work options