Senior Database Engineer
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
As a Senior Database Engineer you are expected to own and evolve our mission-critical database platforms in a high-availability, 24×7 production environment. This role sits at the intersection of database engineering, SRE practices, and automation, and will play a key part in ensuring reliability, scalability, and operational excellence for business-critical systems.
You will be responsible not just for keeping databases running, but for engineering resilience, driving automation, and mentoring teams to operate with production-first and reliability-focused mindsets., Database Platform Ownership
- Lead design, build, and operations of large-scale database platforms including MongoDB Enterprise, Percona MongoDB, MongoDB Atlas, along with SQL Server, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
- Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, backup, and disaster recovery across multi-region deployments with stringent uptime SLAs.
- Drive capacity planning, performance optimisation, and lifecycle management for production databases.
Reliability & Production Excellence
- Own production support and incident management for database services, including high-severity incidents in 24/7 environments.
- Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and implement permanent fixes to reduce recurrence and improve MTTR.
- Define and implement SRE practices such as SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, proactive monitoring, and alerting.
Automation & Engineering
- Design and develop automation using Ansible, Python, Bash, and PowerShell to eliminate manual work in patching, deployment, DR testing, monitoring, and compliance validation.
- Integrate database operations into CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices.
- Apply software engineering principles to database operations to improve consistency, repeatability, and scalability.
Security, Risk & Compliance
- Identify operational and architectural risks related to database platforms and proactively mitigate them.
- Define and enforce security, governance, and compliance controls aligned with enterprise and regulatory standards.
- Support audits and contribute to policy development and standard operating procedures.
Collaboration & Leadership
- Work closely with application teams, product managers, architects, cloud, and infrastructure teams to align database solutions with business needs.
- Act as a technical advisor to stakeholders, providing data-driven recommendations on platform strategy and optimization.
- Mentor and coach DBA and SRE teams across locations, raising the overall operational maturity of the organization.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in NoSQL database administration.
- Strong hands-on experience with Couchbase and Apache Cassandra.
- Proven experience managing large, production-grade NoSQL clusters.
- Solid understanding of high availability, replication, and disaster recovery concepts.
- Experience with Linux/Unix environments.
- Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools (iCinga, Nimsoft, Splunk, ELK).
- Experience working in ITIL / SLA-driven production environments.
- Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and communication skills.Experience working in ITIL/SLA-driven production environments.
- Excellent troubleshooting, analytical, and communication skills.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to build rapport and trust with clients.
- Strategic thinker with the ability to develop and execute innovative solutions.
- Strong understanding of technology trends and market developments.
- Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams.
Qualification:
- Must be educated to at least degree level or equivalent.