Senior Database Reliability Engineer I - Germany/Austria/UK

JOB SUMMARY

You will own the reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of the PostgreSQL data platform behind our flagship CMS — primarily Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL — along with the infrastructure and automation around it.

This is a reliability engineering role, not a classic administration one. Aurora takes care of patching, backups, failover, and storage growth; you own what it does not — query and index strategy, plan regressions across major version upgrades, vacuum and bloat, connection management, zero-downtime schema change, logical replication, and capacity and cost modeling. Alongside this, you work as a full member of the Infrastructure team on Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and security tooling, and you share the on-call rotation.

You will work in a shared-ownership model: backend teams own their queries and schemas, and you own the platform, guardrails, tooling, and knowledge-sharing that make their decisions safe. You will collaborate closely with backend engineers, DevOps engineers, Security, product owners, and the Data team.

We measure success by the reliability and predictable performance of the data platform, the quality of your incident response, and how well other engineering teams are equipped to make sound database decisions without you in the room.

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS

Database platform (approx. 60%)

• Own the reliability, performance, and scalability of our PostgreSQL platform (primarily Amazon Aurora): query and index strategy, execution plans, configuration tuning, and capacity planning, with particular attention to hot multi-tenant read paths.
• Lead zero-downtime version upgrades and schema migrations at scale, including diagnosing and preventing plan regressions across Aurora major versions.
• Own the operational health of the platform: vacuum strategy and bloat, long-running transactions and wraparound risk, connection management and pooling (including RDS Proxy), lock contention, and logical replication and slot hygiene.
• Review schema changes and DDL from backend teams for lock behavior, migration safety, and performance impact, and build the guardrails and tooling that make safe changes to the default path.
• Own backup, restore, and disaster recovery end-to-end, including rehearsed restore drills and the access, encryption, and auditing controls our compliance obligations require.
• Model database capacity and cost (I/O-Optimized vs. Standard, Serverless v2 sizing, read replica strategy) and drive cost-efficiency without compromising reliability.

Infrastructure and automation (approx. 40%)

• Deliver infrastructure and automation as a full member of the Infrastructure team, using Terraform and cloud-native tooling on AWS, and contribute to CI/CD pipelines including the safe automated handling of database changes.
• Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability for database and platform systems (e.g. pg_stat_statements, Prometheus exporters, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry) so problems surface before customers feel them.
• Use cloud security and vulnerability management tooling (such as Aikido) to triage findings and keep the team's services compliant.

Team, incidents, and collaboration

• Take part in the on-call rotation, incident response, and postmortems, driving root cause analysis and remediation that prevents recurrence.
• Raise the database competence of the wider engineering organization through design reviews, documentation and runbooks, and mentoring — so this expertise is not concentrated in one person.
• Demonstrate AI literacy, leveraging AI tools to enhance productivity, decision-making, and quality of work while applying sound judgment and critical thinking.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE; QUALIFICATIONS

Required — PostgreSQL depth

• 7+ years in database engineering, database reliability, infrastructure, or SRE roles, including significant hands-on ownership of production PostgreSQL.
• Deep PostgreSQL expertise: internals and MVCC, reading and acting on EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS), indexing strategy, vacuum behavior, locking, connection pooling, and configuration tuning.
• Strong experience with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and AWS-managed database services.
• Proven track record of zero-downtime upgrades and complex schema migrations on large, busy tables.
• Hands-on experience with physical and logical replication, partitioning, read scaling, and designing and validating backup and disaster-recovery strategies.

Required — Infrastructure and ways of working

• Solid experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, primarily Terraform, on AWS.
• Strong Linux fundamentals plus fluency in at least one scripting language (Bash, Python, Ruby, or Go) for automation and tooling.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tooling, and a solid grasp of security practices (IAM, secrets management, network segmentation).
• Experience with change, incident, and problem management in production, and with Git and modern CI/CD workflows applied to database changes.
• Strong written and verbal communication in a remote-first organization, including the ability to explain database trade-offs to backend engineers and non-specialists.
• Willingness and ability to participate in an on-call rotation.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with backend frameworks that interact with PostgreSQL (Ruby on Rails preferred; Python, Rust, or Elixir valued).
• Experience with caching layers (Redis, Memcached) and their interaction with database load.
• Exposure to analytics pipelines and warehousing (Redshift, Snowflake, ClickHouse) or CDC-based data flows.
• Experience with container platforms (ECS, EKS, Fargate), NoSQL or vector databases, or AWS certification (Database – Specialty, DevOps Engineer – Professional).