Senior Database Reliability Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Design, develop, and maintain shared database platform components utilized by Sezzle applications.

• Establish dependable and scalable patterns for services that connect to and interact with relational databases.

• Collaborate with backend engineering teams to enhance connection lifecycle, transactions, retries, timeouts, pooling, query patterns, and migration workflows.

• Create automation and internal tools for safer and repeatable database operations.

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

• Architect and enhance AWS RDS/Aurora MySQL and PostgreSQL infrastructure, including RDS Proxy, replicas, backups, failover, monitoring, and capacity planning.

• Lead initiatives for database reliability to minimize operational risks and enhance performance.

• Review application designs and database modifications for reliability, scalability, maintainability, and security.

• Develop migration guardrails, automated checks, rollback expectations, schema review workflows, observability, and production safety controls.

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

• Investigate production database issues using telemetry, metrics, logs, query plans, traces, and cloud infrastructure data.

• Identify and resolve systemic issues such as unsafe migrations, inefficient queries, connection storms, lock contention, replication lag, and capacity bottlenecks.

• Create and maintain dashboards, alerts, SLOs, SLIs, runbooks, and operational readiness checks.

• Improve backup validation, restore testing, disaster recovery, failover readiness, and business continuity.

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

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

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

⛳️ Requirements

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

• Proficient in at least one production programming language such as Go, Python, or TypeScript.

• Proven track record of building production-quality internal tools, libraries, frameworks, services, or platform components used by other engineers.

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

• Strong 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 improving shared database access patterns, internal database packages, ORM wrappers, migration frameworks, or developer-facing database tools.

• Hands-on expertise 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 in assessing database performance using 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.

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

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

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

• Demonstrated experience utilizing Claude or equivalent large language model tools is required.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

🏝️ Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.

• Flexible working hours and remote work options.

• Generous paid time off and holidays.

• Professional development opportunities and training.

• Collaborative and inclusive work environment.