Senior Database Reliability Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Database Reliability Engineer based in the United States.

This is a high-impact engineering role responsible for the reliability, performance, availability, and cost efficiency of production databases powering a modern healthcare technology platform.

• Own the reliability, performance, availability, and operational health of production databases running on AWS Aurora MySQL across EHR, Data, and AI workloads.
• Manage database observability end to end, maintaining the metrics and alerting pipeline into Datadog and integrating after-hours database alerts into the DevOps on-call rotation.
• Establish automated safeguards to identify and terminate long-running or runaway queries and provide immediate visibility into database activity across instances.
• Investigate database performance issues by analyzing execution plans, optimizing queries, re-indexing where appropriate, and reducing unnecessary database load and latency.
• Review application and EHR queries before production release, serving as a performance gate to prevent inefficient workloads from reaching production.
• Educate engineering teams on database hygiene, query optimization, and practices that improve reliability and performance.
• Create and maintain comprehensive database runbooks so first responders can resolve incidents quickly and consistently.
• Architect and continuously optimize Aurora reader topologies and read-routing strategies based on actual workload requirements.
• Own database cost efficiency through instance right-sizing, reserved-capacity and Savings Plan strategies, and appropriate storage tiering.
• Manage replication health, backups, restore testing, failover procedures, and disaster recovery capabilities.
• Establish safe, repeatable standards for database schema changes and migrations across engineering teams.
• Partner with platform architecture stakeholders to evaluate and determine the best technical approach for new and existing database workloads.
• Handle protected health information responsibly while maintaining database operations within a HIPAA-compliant environment.

• 6+ years of experience in database reliability engineering, database administration, database engineering, or a closely related discipline, including ownership of production systems at scale.
• Deep expertise in MySQL, including query optimization, execution-plan analysis, indexing strategies, and replication; hands-on Aurora MySQL experience is strongly preferred.
• Experience operating large, multi-reader Aurora or RDS clusters at terabyte scale, including read-routing and connection-management strategies.
• Strong knowledge of database observability and monitoring technologies such as Datadog, Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), Performance Insights, Prometheus, or Grafana.
• Proficiency with Python, Bash, or a comparable scripting language for automation, along with practical experience using infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.
• Strong AWS operational knowledge, particularly RDS/Aurora, database sizing, reserved capacity, storage options, and cloud cost optimization.
• Experience with production on-call rotations, incident response, troubleshooting, and creation of operational runbooks.
• Strong understanding of database reliability, security, backup, recovery, failover, and disaster-recovery practices.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to educate and influence engineers across multiple teams.
• Experience with cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks, or Redshift is a plus, particularly where analytical workloads can be moved away from OLTP databases.
• Experience working with HIPAA-regulated or other compliance-heavy environments involving sensitive data is advantageous.
• Familiarity with automated query-remediation approaches such as Percona Toolkit, pt-kill, statement timeouts, or custom query termination systems is beneficial.
• Application-side experience, particularly with PHP, is a plus for effective collaboration on query and application performance.
• Knowledge of database and cloud security best practices, agile methodologies, and fast-paced engineering environments is valued.

• Competitive salary and compensation package.
• Remote/hybrid working environment.
• Potential equity compensation based on outstanding performance.
• Flexible PTO.
• Company-sponsored lunches.
• Company-paid disability and life insurance.
• Company-paid family and medical leave.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Discounted pet insurance.
• FSA/DCA and commuter benefits.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Credits toward online fitness classes and gym memberships.
• Access to an HQ recovery suite featuring a cold plunge, sauna, and shower.
• Opportunity to work on meaningful healthcare technology and solve complex infrastructure challenges.
• Collaborative environment focused on smart, sustainable work.