Senior Database Engineer (DBRE)
About The Position
The Database Reliability Engineering team builds and operates the production database and data systems that power Cisco Meraki's cloud platform and Dashboard. We make high-volume device telemetry ingestion, customer-facing data access, product workflows, analytics, monitoring, and operational data needs reliable at global scale, so engineers and customers can depend on the data behind Meraki's products. Our work sits at the intersection of database engineering, reliability engineering, and platform operations, with a focus on high availability, business continuity, performance, scalability, observability, and safe change management. We are a small, experienced team with a high-ownership, pragmatic, and collaborative culture; we work closely with SRE and product engineering teams while owning critical systems end to end. This is an opportunity to work on core data reliability problems where improvements in automation, resilience, and operability have an immediate impact across Meraki. As a Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you will help make Meraki's database and data systems reliable, scalable, secure, and operable. You will combine database engineering, reliability engineering, and platform automation to support relational databases, streaming systems, analytical stores, and low-latency data services. You will work closely with SRE, application engineering, security, and infrastructure teams to improve the availability and performance of our data systems, reduce operational toil, and guide safe architectural changes as the platform grows.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting PostgreSQL in production environments.
- 5+ years of experience managing production database or distributed data systems across application, database, operating system, storage, and network layers.
- 3+ years of experience in Linux systems engineering (performance tuning, memory management, I/O tuning, configuration, security, and networking) and automating infrastructure or database operations with tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet.
- 2+ years of experience using at least one scripting or programming language such as Python, Bash, Go, Ruby, or Perl for automation and operational tooling.
- Experience working in a polyglot production data environment, including at least one non-PostgreSQL system such as Kafka/MSK, ClickHouse, Redis, MySQL, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, or a similar distributed data system.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building database platform tooling, self-service workflows, and paved paths that enable application teams to use data systems safely and efficiently.
- Previous work with cloud infrastructure and managed data services, including PostgreSQL on Kubernetes, Amazon RDS, AWS, Terraform, service discovery, and secrets management.
- Ability to operate MSK/Kafka, ClickHouse, or Redis at scale, covering cluster operations, replication, partitioning or sharding, retention, capacity planning, and workload tuning.
- Previous responsibility for refining reliability practices for production data systems, such as SLOs, disaster recovery plans, backup validation, and failover testing.
- Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals and operational behavior, including concurrency, transaction consistency, replication, maintenance, backup and recovery, indexing, and query performance.
- Ability to communicate effectively in writing and verbally by producing design documents, leading operational reviews, explaining tradeoffs, and mentoring engineers.
Responsibilities
- Plan, administer, maintain, and secure the PostgreSQL infrastructure in collaboration with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to ensure high performance and reliability.
- Design, build, and maintain ETL pipelines for PostgreSQL, as well as develop procedures and scripts for data migration.
- Perform operational database administration tasks such as installation, upgrades, patching, backup/recovery, monitoring, capacity planning, and architectural changes in cloud environments.
- Participate in production operations such as on-call rotation, incident response, monitoring, alerting, and post-incident review processes.
Benefits
- medical, dental and vision insurance
- a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution
- paid parental leave
- short and long-term disability coverage
- basic life insurance
- grants of Cisco restricted stock units
- 10 paid holidays per full calendar year
- 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees
- 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday
- paid year-end holiday shutdown
- 4 paid days off for personal wellness
- 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year (non-exempt)
- flexible vacation time off program (exempt)
- 80 hours of sick time off
- Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer
- annual bonuses (for non-sales roles)
- performance-based incentive pay (for sales roles)
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
