Senior Database Reliability Engineer

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

📋 Description

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

• Create dependable and scalable patterns 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 usage within application code, focusing on connection lifecycles, transaction handling, retries, timeouts, pooling, query patterns, and migration workflows.

• Develop automation and internal tools that enhance the safety, repeatability, and reduced reliance on manual intervention for database operations.

• Define 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, boosting performance, and enabling 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 outset.

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

• 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.

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

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

• Promote enhancements in database backup validation, restore testing, disaster recovery, failover readiness, 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 aligned controls.

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

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

⛳️ Requirements

• 6+ years of 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.

• Proven track record of building 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 environments.

• Solid 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-focused database tools.

• Practical experience with AWS RDS/Aurora, including 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 using query plans, indexes, slow query logs, wait events, locks, metrics, and application traces.

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

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

• Experience 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 high-impact issues, propose practical solutions, and drive them to completion.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health insurance

• Retirement plans

• Paid time off

• Flexible work arrangements

• Professional development