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OktaOktaSan Francisco, CA

Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE)

Designs, operates, and optimizes large-scale PostgreSQL and MySQL databases for mission-critical systems. Builds automation, monitoring, and high-availability infrastructure while leading incident response and collaborating with engineering teams. Requires 4+ years PostgreSQL experience.

143k – 220k/yr
Hybrid4+ YOEDevOps / SRE

About the role

Responsibilities

Architecture, Reliability & Performance

  • Design, implement, and operate highly available PostgreSQL clusters (physical replication, logical replication, sharding/partitioning, failover automation).
  • Optimize query performance, indexing strategies, schema design, and storage engines.
  • Perform capacity planning, growth forecasting, and workload modeling.
  • Own high-availability strategies including automatic failover, multi-AZ/multi-region setups, and disaster recovery.

Automation & Tooling

  • Develop automation for provisioning, configuration, backups, failovers, vacuum tuning, and schema management using Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes Operators, or custom tooling.
  • Build monitoring, alerting, and self-healing systems for PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Operations & Incident Response

  • Lead response during database incidents—performance regressions, replication lag, deadlocks, bloat issues, storage failures, etc.
  • Conduct root-cause analysis and implement permanent fixes.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Partner with software engineers to review SQL, optimize schemas, and ensure efficient use of PostgreSQL features.
  • Provide guidance on database-related design patterns, migrations, version upgrades, and best practices.

Required Qualifications

  • 4+ years of hands-on PostgreSQL experience in high-volume, distributed, or large-scale production environments.
  • Strong knowledge of PostgreSQL internals (WAL, MVCC, bloat/vacuum tuning, query planner, indexing, logical replication).
  • Production experience with MySQL (InnoDB internals, replication, performance tuning).
  • Advanced SQL and strong understanding of schema design and query optimization.
  • Experience with Linux systems, networking fundamentals, and systems troubleshooting.
  • Experience building automation with Go or Python.
  • Production experience with monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, PMM, pg_stat_statements, etc.).
  • Hands-on experience with cloud environments (AWS or GCP).

Preferred/Bonus Qualifications

  • Experience with PgBouncer, HAProxy, or other connection-pooling/load-balancing layers.
  • Exposure to event streaming (Kafka, Debezium) and change data capture.
  • Experience supporting 24/7 production environments with on-call rotation.
  • Contributions to open-source PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Skills

PostgresMySQLTerraformAnsibleKubernetesPrometheusGrafanaDatadogAWSGCPGoPythonLinuxSQLPgbouncer

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