Senior Database Reliability Engineer

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

📋 Description

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

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

• 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 processes.

• Create automation and internal tools to ensure database operations are safer, more repeatable, and less reliant on manual efforts.

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

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

• Lead initiatives for database reliability that minimize operational risks, enhance performance, and support safe scaling for Sezzle.

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

• Establish guardrails for database migrations, which include automated checks, rollback expectations, schema review workflows, 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 issues by merging application telemetry, database metrics, logs, query plans, traces, and cloud infrastructure data.

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

• Create and sustain high-signal dashboards, alerts, SLOs, SLIs, runbooks, and operational readiness assessments for database-backed services.

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

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

• Mentor engineers on database architecture, query optimization, safe migration practices, operational readiness, and production debugging.

• Leverage automation and AI tools where suitable to enhance migration reviews, query assessments, incident investigations, documentation, and developer efficiency.

⛳️ Requirements

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

• Strong software engineering proficiency 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 utilized by other engineers.

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

• Solid understanding of how application code interacts with databases, encompassing 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.

• Hands-on experience with AWS RDS/Aurora, including provisioning, upgrades, replicas, backups, failover, monitoring, parameter tuning, and troubleshooting in production.

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

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

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

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

• Proficient with 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 effective implementation.

• Capability to work independently, identify significant problems, propose practical solutions, and drive them to completion.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary

• Flexible work arrangements