Senior Database Reliability Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Design, develop, and sustain shared database platform components utilized by Sezzle applications, including database connection packages, client libraries, migration tools, safety checks, query standards, and developer-facing abstractions.

• Establish dependable and scalable methodologies for how Sezzle services connect to and interact with relational databases across production, staging, and development environments.

• Collaborate with backend engineering teams to enhance database utilization in application code, covering aspects like connection lifecycle, transaction management, retries, timeouts, pooling, query patterns, and migration workflows.

• Create automation and internal tools that enhance the safety, repeatability, and reduce reliance on manual processes in database operations.

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

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

• Lead initiatives aimed at improving database reliability to mitigate operational risk, enhance performance, and facilitate safe scaling for Sezzle.

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

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

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

• Investigate production database challenges by synthesizing application telemetry, database metrics, logs, query plans, traces, and cloud infrastructure data.

• Identify and resolve systemic database issues rather than merely addressing symptoms — including poor access patterns, unsafe migrations, inefficient queries, connection storms, lock contention, replication lag, and capacity bottlenecks.

• Develop and maintain high-signal dashboards, alerts, SLOs, SLIs, runbooks, and operational readiness assessments for database-supported services.

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

• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to enhance database access controls, auditability, encryption, secrets management, least privilege, and PCI/SOC 2 aligned controls.

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

• Leverage automation and AI tools as appropriate to enhance migration reviews, query analysis, incident investigations, 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.

• Robust understanding of the interaction between application code and 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-oriented database tools.

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

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

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

• Experience in designing secure database migration processes for production environments.

• Comprehensive understanding of observability for database-backed applications, focusing on metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, alerting, and incident response.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD systems, including Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Kubernetes, Helm, or similar tools.

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

• Capacity to work independently, identify high-impact issues, propose practical solutions, and see them through to completion.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and performance-based bonuses.

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.

• Generous vacation and paid time off policy.

• Opportunities for professional development and continuous learning.

• Flexible work hours and remote work options.