Database Reliability Engineer

WorkOS•San Francisco, CA

3d•Remote

About The Position

WorkOS is seeking a Database Reliability Engineer to join their Infrastructure team. This role will focus on ensuring the reliability, performance, and scalability of WorkOS's PostgreSQL infrastructure. The Database Reliability Engineer will be the primary expert for all database-related matters, working across the stack to support the company's growth. This involves query optimization, capacity planning, incident response, and building automation to improve the data layer's self-healing capabilities. The ideal candidate will combine software engineering principles with deep database administration expertise.

Requirements

5+ years of experience running PostgreSQL in production at scale, with strong knowledge of internals (WAL, MVCC, vacuum tuning, query planner, indexing, replication).
Solid software engineering skills. You write production-quality code, not just scripts.
Experience with Python, Go, Ruby, or similar languages.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or similar).
Strong SQL skills and the ability to review and optimize complex queries for high-throughput, low-latency environments.
Experience with database high-availability patterns: streaming replication, connection pooling (PgBouncer), failover automation (Patroni or similar).
Familiarity with cloud database services on AWS (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache) or equivalent platforms.
Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar) applied to database workloads.
Comfort with on-call responsibilities and a track record of effective incident response.
Strong written and verbal communication skills. You document your work and share context proactively.
A proactive, ownership-driven mindset. When you see something broken, you fix it. When you see a pattern of toil, you automate it.

Nice To Haves

Experience with other data stores beyond PostgreSQL (Redis, DynamoDB, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch).
Familiarity with Ruby on Rails or Django and how ORMs interact with the database layer.
Experience with database migration tooling and blue-green or zero-downtime migration strategies.
Contributions to open-source database tooling or the PostgreSQL ecosystem.
Background in security-sensitive environments, particularly around data encryption, access controls, and compliance requirements.

Responsibilities

Own the reliability, performance, and scalability of WorkOS's PostgreSQL infrastructure.
Analyze and implement best practices for database clusters, including replication, connection pooling, high availability, and disaster recovery.
Build and maintain observability for database metrics (query performance, replication lag, connection saturation, storage growth) and ensure SLOs are met.
Provide database expertise to product engineering teams through migration reviews, query optimization guidance, and schema design consultation.
Develop automation and self-service tooling for engineers to interact with databases.
Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response for database-related production issues, including root cause analysis and permanent fixes.
Plan and manage database capacity, forecasting growth and ensuring infrastructure can handle increased workloads.
Collaborate with SREs to roll out infrastructure changes with a focus on minimizing risk to the data layer.
Document operational procedures, runbooks, and architectural decisions.
Drive improvements to backup and recovery strategies, regularly testing and validating disaster recovery procedures.