Principal Database Reliability Engineer

Principal Engineer - DBRE

We are looking for an exceptional engineer to provide expert-level technical leadership for our Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE) platform. This is a hands-on individual contributor role that owns the architectural direction for our most complex database reliability challenges - high availability, disaster recovery, observability, and platform automation — across thousands of SQL Server, Aurora PostgreSQL, and Snowflake environments running mission-critical workloads for the world’s most sophisticated financial institutions.

What you’ll do:

• Drive architectural direction for the database platform across SQL Server, Aurora PostgreSQL, and Snowflake — covering high availability, disaster recovery, replication, backup and recovery, capacity, performance, and security.
• Own complex, cross-cutting initiatives such as cross-region disaster recovery, platform refresh orchestration, alerting redesign, and cost optimization, taking each from problem statement through to a deployed, owned solution.
• Lead by example with exemplary code, design documents, RFCs, and runbooks, setting the standard for technical writing, code quality, and operational rigor across the DBRE team.
• Reduce operational toil by engineering automation across provisioning, refresh, patching, scaling, failover, and decommissioning — treating manual operations as bugs to be eliminated.
• Lead alert engineering to drive sustainable reductions in alert volume while improving signal quality, partnering with application teams on alert ownership, attribution, and SLA design.
• Drive incident response and root-cause analysis for the most complex production incidents, and convert RCAs into platform-level improvements that prevent recurrence.
• Define reliability KPIs (availability, MTTR, alert sustainability, SLA adherence) and build the dashboards and reporting cadence to track them.
• Partner with application engineering, infrastructure, and SRE teams on schema design, query performance, data lifecycle, and shared reliability patterns, and engage senior leadership on strategy, multi-quarter roadmaps, and budget trade-offs.

What you’ll need:

• A bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field with 9+ years of professional engineering experience, including significant time in a principal-level or equivalent individual contributor role.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in at least one major relational database platform (SQL Server or PostgreSQL) including replication, HA/DR architectures, performance tuning, query optimization, and internals.
• Strong working knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred): VPC networking, EC2, EBS, FSx, IAM, RDS/Aurora, and cross-region replication.
• Strong programming skills in at least one of Python, PowerShell, Go, or T-SQL — capable of writing production-quality automation, not just scripts.
• A proven track record designing and delivering large-scale reliability initiatives (HA/DR, observability, automation platforms) with measurable outcomes.
• Experience leading complex incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-incident improvement programs in 24x7 environments.
• Experience with observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana), modern alerting design, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), and CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, Jenkins).
• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to produce clear design documents and executive-level summaries and to influence stakeholders across engineering, infrastructure, and business teams.
• Experience across multiple database platforms (SQL Server / PostgreSQL / Snowflake / Aurora) and familiarity with financial-services data domains is a bonus.

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Experience Level

Senior Level