Senior Database Reliability Engineer

We are looking for a Database Reliability Engineer to join our team. This is not a traditional DBA role — you are a Dev Ops engineer who happens to have deep SQL and database knowledge. You think in code, manage infrastructure via Terraform, and treat database provisioning, patching, and performance as an engineering problem — not a manual task.

You will own the database infrastructure layer across our AWS environments: provisioning, scaling, observability, and reliability — all through Infrastructure-as-Code. Our current estate includes SQL Server running on Windows EC2 instances. You will partner with application teams to ensure databases are correctly provisioned, optimised, and monitored without becoming a gatekeeper.

Provision and manage AWS RDS instances entirely through Terraform — parameter groups, subnet groups, IAM authentication, secrets rotation, multi-AZ, and read replicas

Own database reliability — design runbooks, define SLOs, set up alerting on slow queries, connection pool saturation, replication lag, and disk growth

Automate database operations — schema migrations, backup validation, failover drills, and patching via CI/CD pipelines

Improve performance — work with development teams on EXPLAIN ANALYZE, query tuning, indexing strategies, and connection pooling (PgBouncer/RDS Proxy)

Secure the data layer — enforce encryption at rest/in transit, IAM database authentication, credential rotation via AWS Secrets Manager, and least-privilege access patterns

Contribute to the platform — build reusable Terraform modules for database provisioning that application teams self-serve from the platform

Participate in on‑call rotation — respond to database incidents, drive RCAs, and implement permanent fixes to prevent recurrence

You've written Terraform to provision an RDS cluster, not just clicked through the console

You've debugged a production slow query using EXPLAIN ANALYZE and fixed it

You think "how do I automate this" before "how do I do this manually"

You're comfortable being on‑call and leading database incident response

You want to build platform capabilities other engineers self‑serve, rather than being a bottleneck

Traditional Oracle/MSSQL DBA focused on GUI-based administration

Engineers who manage databases manually rather than through code

Candidates whose primary experience is "advising" rather than building and operating

AWS — RDS Aurora, Secrets Manager, IAM, Cloud Watch, VPC networking for databases, KMS encryption

Terraform — writing and maintaining modules, state management, remote backends, version pinning

Scripting — Python or Bash for automation, operational tooling, and migration scripts

CI/CD — Git Lab CI or equivalent; using pipelines for infrastructure changes and database migrations

Observability — experience with Datadog, Cloud Watch, or Prometheus/Grafana for database metrics and alerting

Linux — comfortable with system-level troubleshooting in production environments

PgBouncer or RDS Proxy — connection pooling configuration and tuning

Kubernetes — understanding how workloads connect to databases, sidecar patterns, secrets injection

Database migrations — zero‑downtime schema migrations with tools like Flyway, Liquibase, or custom scripted approaches

Financial services or regulated environments — familiarity with audit logging, data residency requirements, PCI DSS / SOC 2 controls

AWS Aurora Global Database — cross-region replication, disaster recovery patterns