Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability, performance, availability, and cost efficiency of production Aurora MySQL databases on AWS across EHR, data, and AI workloads.
• Build and maintain database observability, alerting, and metrics pipelines using Datadog; integrate after-hours alerts into the DevOps on-call rotation.
• Educate engineering teams on database hygiene and query performance.
• Implement automated safeguards for long-running and runaway queries and provide real-time visibility into executing queries.
• Author and maintain database incident runbooks.
• Diagnose, optimize, and re-index problematic queries; reduce latency and database load.
• Review application and EMR queries before release as a database performance gate.
• Architect and right-size Aurora reader topologies and read-routing strategies.
• Optimize database costs through instance sizing, reserved-capacity or Savings Plan strategy, and storage tiering.
• Manage replication, backups, restore testing, failover, and disaster recovery.
• Establish safe schema-change and migration practices.
• Partner with architecture and engineering teams on database workload strategy.
• Handle protected health information responsibly in a HIPAA-compliant environment.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience in database reliability engineering, database administration, or database engineering, including ownership of production systems at scale.
• Deep MySQL expertise, including query optimization, execution-plan analysis, indexing, and replication.
• Hands-on experience operating large, multi-reader Aurora or RDS clusters at terabyte scale, including read routing and connection management.
• Strong command of database observability tools such as Datadog, Percona Monitoring and Management, Performance Insights, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Proficiency in Python, Bash, or a similar scripting language for automation.
• Experience with infrastructure as code using Terraform.
• Strong AWS operational knowledge around RDS and Aurora, including instance sizing, reserved capacity, and storage types.
• Experience with on-call operations, incident response, and runbook authoring.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience operating a cloud data warehouse such as Snowflake, Databricks, or Redshift and moving analytical workloads off OLTP databases.
• Experience in HIPAA-regulated or other compliance-heavy environments handling sensitive data.
• Familiarity with query auto-remediation tools such as pt-kill and Percona Toolkit, statement timeouts, or custom query termination tools.
• PHP familiarity for application query reviews.
• Knowledge of database and cloud security best practices.
• Experience with agile methodologies and fast-paced environments.

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive salary of $220,000–$240,000 annually.
• Potential equity compensation.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Medical, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, family and medical leave, FSA/DCA, commuter, and 401(k) benefits.
• Discounted pet insurance and fitness or gym membership credits.