Database Engineer

Plansource • UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

2d • Remote

About The Position

The Database Engineer is responsible for supporting the reliability, performance, scalability, security, and operational governance of PlanSource's database platforms. This role contributes to lifecycle management for production and non-production database environments, including performance optimization, capacity planning, disaster recovery readiness, cloud modernization, automation, observability, and data lifecycle management. This role blends traditional database administration fundamentals with modern engineering practices, including automation, cloud-native operations, reliability engineering, observability, and cross-functional partnership with application teams. The Database Engineer partners with Engineering, DevOps, Infrastructure, Security, Architecture, and business stakeholders to help ensure database platforms remain reliable, resilient, secure, governed, cost-aware, and aligned with business objectives.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience administering production MySQL-compatible database environments supporting customer-facing or business-critical applications.
• Hands-on AWS database experience, including Amazon RDS and/or Aurora MySQL.
• Strong SQL tuning, query optimization, indexing, and performance troubleshooting skills.
• Experience with backup, restore, replication, and high availability database practices.
• Experience supporting production systems in high-availability, high-volume, or business-critical environments.
• Experience with database monitoring, observability, and performance analysis using tools such as CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus, MySQL Performance Schema, slow query logs, or similar
• Linux administration, shell scripting, or operational automation experience.
• Experience operating in Agile, DevOps, and change-controlled production environments.
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and manage multiple priorities.
• Willingness to participate in production support, maintenance windows, and database-related on-call rotations.

Nice To Haves

• 5+ years administering production MySQL environments supporting customer-facing applications.
• Experience with sharded MySQL environments, multi-tenant SaaS platforms, or large-scale distributed database architectures.
• Exposure to Database Reliability Engineering or Site Reliability Engineering practices applied to database platforms.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, including Terraform.
• Experience supporting Microsoft SQL Server environments or working across multiple relational database platforms such as MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or Aurora.
• Experience with data retention, archive, purge, rollback, reinstate, and lifecycle management activities.
• Experience with database modernization, migration, major version upgrades, or cloud migration initiatives.
• Familiarity with incident management, problem management, change management, and architecture governance frameworks.
• Exposure to database cost optimization, AWS cost management, or cloud FinOps practices.
• Experience partnering with application engineering teams on schema design, query design, release readiness, and performance-impacting changes.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain database dashboards, alerts, performance baselines, and operational metrics to improve visibility, reduce alert noise, and support proactive issue detection.
• Support operational health, reliability, and availability of MySQL, Aurora, and RDS environments.
• Monitor, analyze, and optimize database performance across production and non-production environments.
• Troubleshoot database issues across application, database, infrastructure, storage, and network layers with appropriate escalation when needed.
• Contribute to root cause analysis efforts and implement corrective and preventative actions to reduce recurring incidents.
• Participate in 24x7 production support, maintenance windows, and database-related on-call rotations.
• Review database-impacting application changes, including schema migrations, indexing changes, query patterns, release risks, and application data access patterns.
• Perform SQL tuning, query optimization, indexing analysis, and workload performance reviews.
• Analyze workload patterns and recommend opportunities to improve scalability, throughput, and customer experience.
• Assist with replication performance, database configuration, storage utilization, and resource consumption optimization.
• Partner with Engineering teams on schema design, query design, application database access patterns, and performance-impacting changes.
• Contribute to database capacity forecasts based on growth trends, enrollment patterns, utilization, and business demand.
• Identify scaling risks and recommend proactive remediation strategies before capacity or performance constraints impact customers.
• Support sharded database environments, workload balancing, tenant placement analysis, and database growth initiatives.
• Provide capacity, performance, and risk information to Technology leadership and senior technical stakeholders as needed.
• Maintain and execute database recovery procedures.
• Perform backup validation, snapshot review, and restoration testing.
• Participate in failover planning, disaster recovery exercises, and recovery readiness reviews.
• Partner with Infrastructure and Reliability teams to support established RTO and RPO objectives.
• Administer AWS RDS and Aurora MySQL database platforms under established standards and patterns.
• Support database modernization, migration, and cloud optimization initiatives.
• Apply cloud database best practices for security, resilience, performance, and cost awareness.
• Assist with multi-region recovery strategies, encryption, backup architecture, and cloud-native operational patterns.
• Partner with Engineering, Compliance, Security, and business teams to support retention, archival, purge, and recovery strategies.
• Support archive database environments, storage optimization efforts, and database lifecycle management activities.
• Maintain and execute purge, rollback, reinstate, and recovery procedures for lifecycle management activities.
• Help ensure database practices align with applicable data governance, retention, and compliance expectations.
• Automate database administration, maintenance, monitoring, provisioning, and recovery processes where practical.
• Contribute to Infrastructure-as-Code and operational tooling supporting database environments.
• Improve deployment, alerting, reporting, and operational workflows to reduce manual toil and improve consistency.
• Support repeatable, documented, and governed database platform capabilities.
• Follow and contribute to database architecture standards, operational runbooks, and technical documentation.
• Participate in architecture review, change management, incident review, and problem management processes as needed.
• Contribute to standards for upgrades, migrations, onboarding, backup, security, and operational readiness.
• Promote cross-functional collaboration and clear communication across Engineering, DevOps, Infrastructure, Security, and Technology leadership.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health coverage with multiple medical plan options - all covering 100% of in-network preventive care.
• Employer‑funded Health Savings Account (HSA) - up to $1,000 annually for family coverage.
• Dental & Vision plans with 100% coverage for routine dental care and $250 vision frame allowance, plus employee-only vision premiums at $0.
• 401(k) with immediate vesting and a 50% company match up to 6% of contributions.
• Generous paid parental leave, adoption assistance, and fertility benefits.
• Flexible PTO, paid holidays, a strong culture of work‑life balance and Flex Fridays in the summer.
• Mental health & wellbeing support, including Employee Assistance Program (EAP), movement and wellness resources.
• Rewards and recognition programs that celebrate employees through peer recognition, awards, and quarterly recognition initiatives.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level