Manager, Database Engineering

Q2 • Austin, TX

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

Q2 is a leading provider of digital banking and lending solutions to banks, credit unions, alternative finance companies, and fintechs in the U.S. and internationally. Our mission is simple: build strong and diverse communities through innovative financial technology—and we do that by empowering our people to help create success for our customers. We run a large SQL Server estate at serious scale, mostly on EC2, alongside a fast-growing set of PostgreSQL, Aurora, Snowflake, MongoDB, and Pinecone workloads supporting analytical and AI use cases. We are primarily an AWS shop with a small Azure footprint, and this team keeps that estate fast, available, recoverable, and cost-efficient for the financial institutions that depend on it. We are looking for a manager who owns production and drives our engineers to be the best versions of themselves. Not someone who reacts to what breaks, but someone who anticipates risk, guides a highly skilled team to the best solution, and drives programs end to end without being told to. Patching and maintenance are an afterthought for us; the successful candidate is already thinking about the problems the team hasn't realized it has yet. A defining trait of this team is that we build our own solutions rather than outsource: we build custom tooling so we can scale with technology instead of people, while knowing the line where a vendor solves it more economically. We serve two sets of customers who both matter deeply. Externally, a bad day for us can mean a bank that anchors a local community is unavailable to the people who depend on it. Internally, our stakeholders are other Q2'ers, and the goal is to multiply their impact through self-service tooling to the point where they don't need a DBA at all.

Requirements

• Typically requires a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field and a minimum of 6 years of related experience; or an advanced degree with 4+ years of experience
• Typically requires 1-2 years managing and developing employees
• Deep SQL Server expertise at scale: Always On availability groups, multi-region high availability and DR, performance troubleshooting, and enterprise licensing economics
• Ability to lead engineers across multiple database technologies: relational (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Aurora), analytical (Snowflake), and non-relational or specialized stores (MongoDB, vector databases such as Pinecone). Expertise in all is not required, but you must guide direction, judge quality, and grow specialists across the estate
• Strong AWS depth running a database estate primarily on EC2, treating cloud cost as a first-class engineering concern; working Azure knowledge is useful
• A track record of defining and driving programs end to end, including migration or modernization work you initiated and owned, not just projects you were assigned
• Robust, hands-on AI ability to build observability and tooling quickly; this is critical, not optional
• Strong judgment under pressure and a bias to own the ambiguous, unowned problem rather than route it away
• Familiarity with security, compliance, and operational best practices; financial services or other regulated, high-availability experience preferred
• This position requires fluent written and oral communication in English.
• Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

Nice To Haves

• financial services or other regulated, high-availability experience preferred

Responsibilities

• Own production: accountable for availability, performance, and recoverability across the multi-engine estate.
• Own the coverage model and act as the incident-command backstop so the team, not any one person, carries a bad day
• Set technical direction and own the outcome.
• Guide highly skilled engineers to the best solution, mentoring rather than driving where that serves better, and tell senior stakeholders where we are going and why
• Champion build-our-own tooling and self-service, with the judgment to know where a vendor is the more economical answer
• Push AI hands-on to build observability into the stack and extend the tooling we have already built
• Grow the team and hold it accountable to the value it delivers: coach, set clear expectations, and run honest performance conversations
• Own the economics: enterprise licensing and annual true-up, storage right-sizing, and cost-to-serve.
• Track spend and defend the numbers to finance and leadership
• Set the standards for availability-group and DR design, build and automation practices, and data security and access control aligned with governance policy
• Lead modernization end to end: version migrations, cross-engine consolidation, and DR maturation, driven to measurable milestones
• Establish engineering rhythms, KPIs, and accountability, and partner across data platform, architecture, and product to deliver curated data products

Benefits

• Hybrid Work Opportunities
• Flexible Time Off
• Career Development & Mentoring Programs
• Health & Wellness Benefits, including competitive health insurance offerings and generous paid parental leave for eligible new parents
• Community Volunteering & Company Philanthropy Programs
• Employee Peer Recognition Programs – “You Earned it”

What This Job Offers

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