Senior Database Reliability Engineer, PostgreSQL, IaC

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Poland, +2 more countries.

📋 Description

• Design and manage highly available PostgreSQL databases across various zones and regions, incorporating automated, tested failover and split-brain fencing.

• Establish database infrastructure as code, covering clusters, parameters, networking, access, monitoring, and backups, with peer reviews, CI/CD applications, and drift detection.

• Develop self-service database provisioning solutions for product teams.

• Strategize and implement migrations, upgrades, and table relocations with zero or minimal downtime.

• Collaborate with developers on schema modifications, query optimization, connection pooling, transaction handling, retries, and expand-and-contract migrations.

• Define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and create SLO-based alerts and dashboards utilizing Prometheus, Grafana, or similar tools.

• Design backup and recovery processes, and perform scheduled restore and failover tests to evaluate Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

• Optimize costs by right-sizing instances and storage.

• Ensure data security through least-privilege access, secrets management, encryption, audited access, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) masking.

• Lead incident response efforts and on-call duties; create blameless post-mortem reports and ensure follow-through on action items.

• Transition manual runbooks to automated solutions while documenting any remaining procedures.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive production experience with PostgreSQL, including MVCC, vacuum and bloat management, locking mechanisms, physical and logical replication, and query planning.

• Proficient in infrastructure as code practices, including version control and peer review processes.

• Experience with CI/CD methodologies for infrastructure and database modifications, particularly schema migrations.

• Over 5 years of experience managing production databases in roles such as DBRE, SRE, platform engineer, or database engineer.

• Familiarity with AWS, particularly RDS or Aurora.

• Proven ability in designing high availability and disaster recovery solutions, encompassing replication, automated failover, multi-region or multi-cloud redundancy, and assessing RTO/RPO/cost trade-offs.

• A successful history of implementing zero-downtime changes, online migrations, major version upgrades, or transferring data between clusters.

• Knowledge of connection pooling, Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs) like Hibernate, transaction scopes, retries, idempotency, and safe deployment sequences.

• Strong observability skills, including the ability to define metrics, set SLO alerts, and engage in data-driven verification.

• Scripting proficiency in Python, Bash, or Go.

• Comfortable operating within a regulated financial services environment.

• Understanding of access control systems, encryption protocols, and audit trails.

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with developers.

• Familiarity with Terraform and Ansible, MySQL, Redshift, ClickHouse, DynamoDB, logical replication or Change Data Capture (CDC) tools, Kubernetes, Java services, Linux performance tuning, and Vault or other secrets management solutions is a plus.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary.

• Work-life harmony.

• Annual performance bonus.

• Generous annual leave.

• Employee referral program.

• Medical insurance.

• Pension plans.

• Location-specific benefits and perks.

• 30 additional days to work remotely from anywhere in the world (certain restrictions apply).

• Two extra paid volunteer days each year.