# Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE)

**Company:** [Okta](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/okta)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL
**Role:** DevOps / SRE
**Salary:** $143k – $220k/yr
**Experience:** 4+ years
**Skills:** Postgres, MySQL, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, AWS, GCP, Go, Python, Linux, SQL, Pgbouncer
**Posted:** 2026-05-05

> 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.

## Job Description

## 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.

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f2c62fd4-e775-49b0-b3bb-65203878daa7
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f2c62fd4-e775-49b0-b3bb-65203878daa7