Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Responsibilities

• Architecture & Standards
• Set and improve how we run databases for customer-facing and internal platform workloads. Choose the right pattern for the job: relational, document, NoSQL, or cache. Define connection pooling and database proxies. Define how we scale with vertical growth, read replicas, sharding or partitioning, and multi-site setups. Set HA and failover standards for shared multi-tenant systems. Keep tenant isolation clear and limit blast radius when something fails.
• Automation & Lifecycle
• Own provisioning, config, upgrades, backup, restore, and decommissioning with infrastructure as code and solid automation. Set RPO and RTO. Prove restore and failover with regular drills. Give product teams safe self-service for routine database work so they do not wait on you for every change.
• Reliability & Performance
• Own production health across on-premises and cloud database: SLOs, capacity, query performance, and database monitoring. Fix hard production issues such as lock contention, replication lag, memory or storage pressure, slow queries, and storage or network bottlenecks. Join on-call, lead post-mortems, and turn fixes into automation or better runbooks. Track storage and compute cost when you plan capacity.
• Security & Compliance
• Own access control, encryption in transit and at rest, audit logging, and change control for the databases. Extend Firmus SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 controls as we add sites and services. Keep backup, restore, and recovery evidence ready for audit. Keep privileged access tight.
• Partnership & Escalations
• Work with software and platform engineers on schema design, safe migrations, data modelling, and performance reviews before release. Work with data engineering and observability where your databases connect to their systems, such as CDC (Change Data Capture), read replicas, and database telemetry. Run design reviews that raise the bar. Join customer escalations when the issue is database reliability, performance, or recovery.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years in database reliability engineering. At least 3 years owning PostgreSQL in large-scale production, such as high concurrency, large datasets, or multi-tenant services. That includes replication, failover, backup and restore, query tuning, and incidents you owned.
• Deep PostgreSQL performance troubleshooting under load, including planner behaviour, locking, bloat, and connection storms.

ROLE SUMMARY

Firmus Technologies is seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to join our Engineering and Technology team.

You will own and evolve the operational datastore platform that Firmus AI Cloud and our internal platform services depend on. The work sits on bare-metal and self-hosted infrastructure as well as cloud, with proven recovery and measurable reliability as first-class product qualities. You build a paved road so product teams can provision and change databases safely, with low cognitive load, instead of waiting on a ticket queue.

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Hands-on with a PostgreSQL HA and backup stack such as Patroni-style HA,

pgBackRest or WAL-G, and pgBouncer or a similar pooler. Has shipped schema or major version changes under load.

Production Redis or Memcached ownership. Has run it with HA or clustering, managed memory and eviction under load, and made clear persistence and failover choices.

Production experience with at least one document or NoSQL store such as MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, or similar. Includes HA or replica setup, backup and restore, and at least one failure mode you diagnosed yourself.

Automates database work with infrastructure as code and Python or Go. Experience with stateful databases on Kubernetes and operators is valued.

Has defined RPO and RTO, run restore and failover drills, and owned SLOs, on-call, and post-mortems that led to lasting fixes.

Understands the Linux storage and network path that affects database performance. Has used Prometheus, Grafana,

OpenTelemetry, or similar for database monitoring.