Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Who you are

• 5+ years of experience running PostgreSQL in large-scale production or SaaS environments
• Demonstrated technical knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, including MVCC, vacuum, WAL, locking, concurrency, and query planning
• Production experience managing PostgreSQL database operations, including:
• Capacity planning
• Backup, point-in-time recovery, and restore validation
• Replication and high availability
• Major-version upgrades
• Indexing, SQL tuning, partitioning, and performance tuning
• Schema migrations, and reviewing query changes for production impact
• Incident response and root-cause analysis for customer-facing production systems
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional engineering teams
• Availability to participate in on-call rotations and scheduled maintenance windows
• Fluency in English, both spoken and written
• Operating PostgreSQL at scale, such as multi-terabyte databases or fleets of hundreds of clusters
• Designing and automating partitioning schemes for high-volume tables
• Patroni or a comparable PostgreSQL HA stack in production
• Connection pooling and load balancing for PostgreSQL, such as PgBouncer or equivalent
• Zero- or near-zero-downtime operations on production PostgreSQL, including schema migrations, partitioning of multi-terabyte tables, and cross-cluster migrations
• Zero- or near-zero-downtime major-version upgrades using logical replication, pg_upgrade, or similar
• Running PostgreSQL clusters in Kubernetes or other containerized environments
• Linux OS fundamentals
• CI/CD and GitOps tools such as Jenkins and ArgoCD
• Infrastructure-as-code and configuration management using Ansible
• Building automation, tooling, or services used in production using Python
• Observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or OpenTelemetry
• Public cloud platforms, particularly OCI
• Apache Cassandra

What the job involves

• 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 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 othe 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 progressivelyautomate
• Be part of the Database Services on-call rotation and planned maintenance windows

Benefits

• Work from home opportunities