Join us for Workable Next! Get an exclusive look at our upcoming product releases. Save your seat

Senior database reliability engineer job description

A Senior Database Reliability Engineer (SDBRE) is a professional who combines database engineering and administration with software development to ensure database systems are reliable, scalable, and performant, particularly focusing on PostgreSQL and other database technologies.

Alexandros Pantelakis
Alexandros Pantelakis

HR content specialist at Workable, delivering in-depth, data-driven articles to offer insights into industry and tech trends.

Refreshed on

February 29, 2024

Reviewed by

Eftychia Karavelaki

Senior Recruitment Manager

Use this Senior Database Reliability Engineer job description template to advertise open roles for your company. Be sure to modify requirements and duties based on the unique needs of the role you’re hiring for.

What is a Senior Database Reliability Engineer?

A Senior Database Reliability Engineer is an integral part of the SRE team, specializing in database technologies. They apply engineering principles, operational discipline, and mature software development practices to maintain and enhance database systems’ reliability. Their expertise in databases, particularly PostgreSQL, enables them to optimize data storage, retrieval, and processing to support user-facing services and production systems efficiently.

What does a Senior Database Reliability Engineer do?

A Senior Database Reliability Engineer ensures that all database systems supporting user-facing and backend services operate flawlessly. They are responsible for the entire lifecycle of database management, from design and implementation to maintenance and scaling.

This role involves analyzing and implementing best practices for database performance, reliability, and scalability. SDBREs develop and maintain infrastructure that supports thousands of concurrent users, manage database capacity, and work on the observability of database metrics to achieve operational objectives.

They also create tools and automation to simplify database operations, enabling engineering teams to focus on development. Collaborating closely with SREs and developers, they play a key role in rolling out changes to the production environment and mitigating database-related incidents.

Leading projects within their domain, they ensure timely delivery and contribute to the continuous improvement of database services.

Senior Database Reliability Engineer responsibilities include:

  • Ensuring the availability, scalability, and performance of database systems.
  • Designing, building, and maintaining core database infrastructure.
  • Developing tools and automation for database infrastructure management.
  • Providing database expertise to engineering and SRE teams.

Job brief

We’re seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to join our remote SRE team, bringing deep database expertise to ensure our systems are always available, scalable, and performing at their peak.

In this role, you’ll be instrumental in maintaining our core database infrastructure, developing automation tools to streamline operations, and providing vital support to our engineering teams.

You’ll tackle challenges related to database capacity, performance, and reliability, ensuring our platform can support thousands of concurrent users worldwide. If you’re passionate about database technologies, cloud solutions, and automation, and you’re ready to take on the responsibility of keeping our database systems running smoothly, we’d love to have you on our team.

Responsibilities

  • Ensure the availability, scalability, and performance of the company’s database systems
  • Analyze solutions and implement best practices for relational and NoSQL database clusters
  • Design, build, and maintain core database infrastructure to support scalability
  • Plan and manage database infrastructure capacity
  • Develop tools and automation for efficient database operations and deployments
  • Collaborate with SREs and engineering teams on production changes and incident mitigation
  • Provide database expertise to engineering teams for designing, releasing, and troubleshooting production systems
  • Lead database-related projects, ensuring their timely delivery

Requirements and skills

  • BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field with a strong background
  • Excellent communication skills in English, especially in written form
  • Analytical and troubleshooting skills for large-scale distributed systems
  • Ability to work independently and deliver projects on time
  • Passion for cloud technologies and automation
  • 5+ years of relevant experience with relational databases in production environments
  • Proficiency in data modeling, structure design, and SQL, with deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals
  • Experience with major cloud providers (GCP, AWS preferred) and configuration management tools (Ansible, Terraform)
  • Familiarity with programming languages (Python, Go, Java, C++)

Frequently asked questions

Jump to section