Geared toward candidates with deep PostgreSQL production experience and a strong background in infrastructure automation, comfortable with designing high availability systems and working in a regulated financial services environment.
Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.
Original posting from Capital via Lever
We are a leading trading platform that is ambitiously expanding to the four corners of the globe. Our top-rated products have won prestigious industry awards for their cutting-edge technology and seamless client experience. We deliver only the best, so we are always in search of the best people to join our ever-growing talented team.
We are hiring a Senior Database Reliability Engineer for our Infrastructure Platform Team. You will design PostgreSQL platforms for resilience and high availability, automate everything you touch, and understand how our services use the database, from connection pools to ORM transactions. Your goal is to keep latency within SLO at a reasonable cost, through every change, failover and migration.
Our stack today: AWS RDS and Aurora (PostgreSQL, MySQL), Redshift, ClickHouse, Terraform, Ansible, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics and Grafana, with Java services on Kubernetes.
Responsibilities::
- Design and run highly available PostgreSQL across zones and regions, with automated, tested failover and fencing against split-brain.
- Define all database infrastructure as code (clusters, parameters, networking, access, monitoring and backups), reviewed by peers and applied through CI/CD pipelines, with drift detection.
- Build self-service database provisioning so product teams get a production-ready database without waiting on a ticket.Plan and execute migrations, upgrades and table moves with zero or near zero downtime, including cross-version, cross-cluster and cross-cloud work.
- Partner with developers on schema changes, queries, connection pooling, transaction scope, retries and expand-and-contract migrations, so database issues are fixed at their source.
- Define SLOs and build SLO-based alerts and dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana or similar) that catch latency and capacity problems before clients do.
- Design backup and recovery, and prove it with scheduled restore and failover tests that measure RTO and RPO and produce evidence for auditors.
- Keep cost in view: right-size instances and storage, and choose the cheapest option that meets the requirement.
- Secure the data: least-privilege access, secrets from a secrets manager, encryption at rest and in transit, audited access and PII masking.
- Lead and take part in incident response and on-call, write blameless post-mortems and make sure their actions get done.
- Replace manual runbooks with automation, and document what remains.
Requirements::
- Deep PostgreSQL production experience. You have run PostgreSQL at scale and understand MVCC, vacuum and bloat, locking, replication (physical and logical) and query planning from real incidents, not only from documentation.
- Infrastructure as code as your normal way of working. Everything you build lives in version control and is reviewed before it is applied.
- CI/CD in your day-to-day work. Your infrastructure and database changes, including schema migrations, reach production through pipelines. If console clicks, SSH changes or wiki steps are how changes normally happen in your current role, this position is not the right fit.
- 5+ years running production databases as a DBRE, SRE, platform or database engineer, ideally with a large part on AWS (RDS or Aurora).
- Experience designing high availability and disaster recovery: replication, automated failover, multi-region or multi-cloud redundancy, and the trade-offs between RTO, RPO and cost.
- A track record of zero-downtime changes: online migrations, major version upgrades or moving data between clusters.
- Understanding of how applications use databases: connection pools, ORMs (for example Hibernate), transaction scope, retries and idempotency, and safe deployment order.
- Observability skills: you define what to measure, alert on SLOs and verify changes with data.Scripting in Python, Bash or Go to automate operational work.
- Comfort in a regulated financial services environment, where access control, encryption and audit trails are non-negotiable.
- Clear communication: you reason out loud, own outcomes and partner with developers instead of gatekeeping.
Nice to have::
- Terraform and Ansible specifically, since they are our current tools.
- MySQL in production.
- Redshift, ClickHouse or DynamoDB.
- Logical replication or CDC tooling (pglogical, AWS DMS, Debezium).
- Kubernetes and running Java services in production.
- Linux performance tuning and troubleshooting on self-managed database hosts.
- Vault or another secrets manager.
What you will get in return:
Competitive Salary: We believe great work deserves great pay! Your skills and talents will be rewarded with a salary that makes you feel valued and motivated.
Work-Life Harmony: Join a company that genuinely cares about you - because your life outside of work matters just as much as your time on the clock. #LI-Hybrid
Annual Performance Bonus: Your hard work doesn’t go unnoticed! Celebrate your achievements with a well-deserved annual bonus tied to your performance.
Generous Time Off: Need a breather? Our annual leave policy lets you recharge and enjoy life outside of work without a worry.
Employee Referral Program: Love working here? Share the love! Bring your talented friends on board and get rewarded for growing our awesome team.
Comprehensive Health & Pension Benefits: From medical insurance to pension plans, we’ve got your back. Plus, location-specific benefits and perks!
Workation Wonderland: Live your digital nomad dreams with 30 extra days to work remotely from anywhere in the world (some restrictions apply). Adventure awaits!
Volunteer Days: Make a difference! Take two additional paid days each year to support causes you care about and give back to the community.
Source: Capital careers (Lever)