Database Reliability Engineer

About this role

Infrastructure owns the path from commit to production and everything that keeps it standing: build, deploy, observability, capacity and incident response.

Keep the databases available and recoverable: replication, failover, backups you have actually restored from, and the capacity planning nobody does until it is late.

Multi-region, containerised, with tenant isolation that has to hold under load. The interesting problems are in resource isolation and in making a deploy boring.

Primary responsibilities

• Own the production database estate: availability, performance, backup and recovery
• Test restores rather than assuming backups work, and know the actual recovery time
• Manage replication, failover and the connection-pooling layer in front of it
• Run major version upgrades on a live system without an outage
• Tune at the instance level and work with engineers on the queries causing the load
• Own the monitoring that catches replication lag, bloat and lock contention before they become an incident

Skills required

Day to day this role works with PostgreSQL, Replication, Backups and Performance.

• Six or more years operating production databases
• Have run a real restore under pressure
• Five or more years operating production databases
• Deep PostgreSQL operations — replication, failover, pooling and upgrades
• Backup and recovery tested by actual restores, with a known recovery time
• Performance tuning at instance and query level
• Monitoring for replication lag, bloat and lock contention