Lead Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) - Small Business Technologies

H&R Block•Remote, MO

1d•$117,700 - $188,300

About The Position

The Lead Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) is a senior technical leader responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence of the organization’s data platforms. This role blends deep database expertise (DBA discipline) with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, focusing on automation, observability, resiliency, and operational maturity. The DBRE partners closely with platform, application, and data teams to ensure database systems are highly available, cost-efficient, and production-ready at scale.

Requirements

8–12+ years in database engineering, SRE, or infrastructure engineering
Hands-on experience with production-grade relational and/or NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, DynamoDB, etc.)
Experience operating systems at scale in cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
Proven ownership of high-availability, mission-critical systems
Strong knowledge of: Database internals, replication, and recovery mechanisms
Strong knowledge of: Performance tuning and optimization techniques
Strong knowledge of: Distributed systems and fault-tolerant architectures
Experience with: Observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)
Experience with: Automation tools (Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines)
Experience with: Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
Familiarity with data lifecycle management and storage optimization
Demonstrated ability to lead through influence in cross-functional environments
Strong incident management and problem-solving skills under pressure
Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to leadership stakeholders
Experience defining engineering standards and operational practices

Nice To Haves

Experience with large-scale, multi-tenant or SaaS data platforms
Background in platform engineering or SRE organizations
Experience with data compliance, governance, and audit requirements
Contributions to reliability frameworks or internal tooling

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end reliability of critical database systems (availability, performance, durability)
Define and maintain SLIs/SLOs for database services
Lead incident response and root cause analysis for database-related outages
Design and implement failover, replication, and disaster recovery strategies
Automate database provisioning, scaling, backups, and recovery processes
Implement Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and GitOps approaches for database environments
Drive reduction of manual operational work through tooling and self-service capabilities
Establish reliability engineering practices (error budgets, postmortems, continuous improvement)
Build and maintain database observability (metrics, logs, traces)
Proactively monitor system health and performance bottlenecks
Optimize query performance, indexing strategies, and resource utilization
Establish capacity planning and forecasting models
Partner with platform engineering to standardize database patterns and tooling
Support cloud-native database architectures (managed services, distributed systems)
Evaluate and recommend database technologies and storage solutions
Ensure systems are designed for resilience, scalability, and cost efficiency
Own backup strategies, validation, and restore testing
Lead disaster recovery planning and execution readiness
Ensure data integrity, consistency, and compliance with governance standards
Work with engineering teams to improve data access patterns and reliability
Partner with security and compliance teams on data protection requirements
Influence application design to align with database reliability best practices
Mentor engineers on database performance and operational excellence
Act as the technical lead for database reliability across teams
Define standards, best practices, and operating models for DBRE
Lead cross-team initiatives to improve reliability and reduce systemic risk
Mentor senior engineers and contribute to talent development