Senior Database Reliability Engineer; PostgreSQL

Medallia is the pioneer and market leader in Experience Management. Our award-winning SaaS platform, Medallia Experience Cloud, leads the market in the management of experiences, insights, and actions for candidates, customers, employees, patients, and residents alike.

We believe that every experience is a memory that can last a lifetime. Experiences shape the way people feel about a company. And they greatly influence how likely people are to advocate, contribute, and stay. At Medallia, we are committed to creating a world where organizations are loved by their customers and their employees.

We empower exceptional people to create extraordinary experiences together.

Bring your whole self.

The Database Services team at Medallia owns the production database systems that power a highly reliable global SaaS platform. Database Reliability Engineers (DBREs) are responsible for the availability, performance, and lifecycle of those systems, and for the platform capabilities that let engineering teams consume database services safely. We work as peers to Site Reliability Engineering, with the same expectations for reliability, incident response, and automation applied to the data layer.

PostgreSQL is the largest part of our estate, and the team is evolving to support additional database technologies, primarily YugabyteDB and Apache Cassandra. Our databases run mostly in Kubernetes environments hosted in Medallia Cloud. We are currently looking for a Senior Database Reliability Engineer who combines deep PostgreSQL expertise with an automation mindset. A substantial part of the role is hands‑on production work: operating clusters, diagnosing incidents, tuning performance, and executing upgrades.

You will use that experience to identify recurring operational pain, fix the underlying causes, and turn repeatable procedures into automation the whole team relies on. As a Senior DBRE you will lead incident reviews, define service objectives for the platform, and mentor other DBREs.

• Own the availability and performance of production PostgreSQL clusters, measured against defined service level objectives.
• Own the database lifecycle: provisioning, configuration, maintenance, major-version upgrades, scaling, and decommissioning.
• Own backup, recovery, replication, and high availability, including regular restore tests and failover drills against agreed recovery point and recovery time objectives.
• Manage capacity planning and growth of the PostgreSQL estate.
• Build monitoring and alerting that reflects symptoms and service objectives rather than individual failures, and keep operational noise low.
• Build production‑quality automation, tooling, and services that replace recurring manual procedures across the database lifecycle.
• Build standardized, supported workflows and self‑service capabilities so engineering teams can provision and operate databases with less direct DBRE involvement.
• Collaborate with product‑engineering teams: review schema migrations and query patterns, and guide them on PostgreSQL best practices.
• Troubleshoot complex problems that span the database, operating system, network, and application layers.
• Lead incident response for database systems, followed by blameless root‑cause analysis and permanent corrective actions.
• Use AI‑assisted engineering tools where they accelerate troubleshooting, automation, and documentation.
• Mentor other DBREs and review technical work.
• Maintain runbooks and documentation that others can follow and progressively automate.
• Be part of the Database Services on‑call rotation and planned maintenance windows.

Candidates based in the Tysons Corner vicinity will be prioritized as this role is Hybrid, 3 days per week onsite.