Site Reliability Engineer III; DBA)

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $100m in revenue and is the leading specialized storage cloud - managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking a Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA) to join our team!

About the Role:

Individuals fulfilling this role will be responsible for ensuring the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production database systems, primarily Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra, alongside the rest of our production services and infrastructure. This role carries the same on-call, incident response, and service ownership expectations as other SRE IIIs, with database systems serving as the area of deepest technical ownership.

Because our SRE Database Engineering function is new, this role will also help establish its operational foundation by designing database architecture and developing the runbooks, escalation guidance, procedures, and training materials that our Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers will use as they onboard. The ideal candidate will have strong experience with production database systems, Linux, automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes, observability, and incident response, with a proactive approach to reliability and operational excellence.

• Design, deploy, and own highly available database architecture for Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra
• Establish and document operational procedures, runbooks, and escalation guidance for Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers
• Optimize database performance through query tuning, indexing strategies, schema design, and capacity planning
• Own database backup, recovery, replication, and disaster recovery strategies
• Perform and validate disaster recovery testing and database recovery procedures
• Drive database security, access control, patching, hardening, and compliance practices
• Partner with the DBA and Data Infrastructure teams on resharding, capacity planning, replication, and architecture decisions for sharded MySQL environments
• Service Reliability & Operations:
  • Support the availability and durability of critical services across production environments
  • Monitor service health using SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, monitoring, logging, and alerting platforms
  • Partner with service owners to define and improve SLIs, SLOs, error budget policies, and alerting
  • Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews
  • Serve as an escalation point for complex database production incidents
  • Follow established ITIL/OSS processes including incident, change, problem, and capacity management
  • Take ownership of operational issues and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution
• Automation & Tooling:
  • Develop automation for common operational and database administration tasks to reduce manual intervention and operational toil
  • Contribute to monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks including Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, and ELK
  • Help integrate operational runbooks and incident…