Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Location:

Wayne, PA, United States

Frontline Education’s vision is Every school thriving. Every community stronger, and our mission is to transform how schools work so every educator and student succeeds. We are looking for a Senior Database Reliability Engineer who is passionate about building resilient, secure, and scalable database platforms that power the applications educators rely on every day. As part of our Data Engineering team, you'll help ensure our production database environments remain highly available, performant, and secure while continuously modernizing how we operate through automation, observability, and AI‑enabled engineering practices.

• Develop a deep understanding of Frontline's production database environments, applications, and operational processes across AWS and on‑premises platforms.
• Design, manage, and optimize production database environments to maximize availability, performance, scalability, security, and operational efficiency.
• Build and maintain database infrastructure using infrastructure as code, configuration management, and automated deployment pipelines.
• Continuously identify opportunities to automate repetitive operational work using AI‑enabled tools and modern engineering practices.
• Implement and maintain backup, recovery, disaster recovery, high‑availability, and database observability solutions using metrics, logs, and traces.
• Maintain database security through patching, encryption, access controls, and compliance with organizational standards.
• Partner closely with Development, Infrastructure, Cloud Engineering, and Client Support teams to resolve production issues and improve overall platform reliability.
• Participate in the team's on‑call rotation while taking ownership of production database operations.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and operational practices that improve scalability, resiliency, automation, and long‑term maintainability.
• Serve as a technical owner for one or more database platforms by mentoring teammates, influencing architecture, sharing knowledge, and driving operational excellence.
• Build trusted partnerships across engineering teams by collaborating openly, sharing expertise, and keeping customer outcomes at the center of technical decisions.

• Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Five or more years administering production database management systems in highly available 24x7 environments.
• Demonstrated expertise with at least two enterprise database platforms such as Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, IBM Db2, or MongoDB.
• Experience with one or more additional database technologies.
• Three or more years automating database or infrastructure operations using scripting, infrastructure as code, configuration management, or CI/CD pipelines.
• Passion for continuous learning and applying emerging technologies thoughtfully to improve engineering outcomes.

• Experience managing production database performance, availability, security, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery.
• Strong SQL expertise, including performance tuning, query optimization, and troubleshooting.
• Experience supporting high‑transaction production systems.
• Strong analytical, communication, and problem‑solving skills.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across engineering organizations while balancing operational excellence with customer needs.
• Experience managing AWS‑hosted databases.
• Experience with Terraform, Ansible, Power Shell, Python, Bash, AWS CLI, or similar automation technologies.
• Linux and Windows administration experience.
• Knowledge of replication, clustering, partitioning, scalability, and high‑availability technologies.
• Experience using database observability and monitoring platforms.
• Familiarity with ETL, data warehousing, or archival solutions.
• Experience working within Agile, Dev Ops, Platform Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering environments.
• A mindset that embraces ownership, collaboration, curiosity, and continuous improvement while using AI…