Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE)

Okta•San Francisco, CA

14h•Hybrid

About The Position

We are looking for a highly skilled Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) with deep expertise in PostgreSQL at scale and solid experience with MySQL. In this role, you will design, operationalize, and optimize the data persistence layer that powers our large-scale, mission-critical systems. You will work closely with SRE, Platform, and Engineering teams to ensure performance, reliability, automation, and operational excellence across our database environment. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building resilient data infrastructure, not just administering it.

Requirements

4 plus years of hands-on PostgreSQL experience in high-volume, distributed, or large-scale production environments.
Strong knowledge of PostgreSQL internals (WAL, MVCC, bloat/ vacuum tuning, query planner, indexing, logical replication).
Production experience with MySQL (InnoDB internals, replication, performance tuning).
Advanced SQL and strong understanding of schema design and query optimization.
Experience with Linux systems, networking fundamentals, and systems troubleshooting.
Experience building automation with Go or Python.
Production experience with monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, PMM, pg_stat_statements, etc.).
Hands-on experience with cloud environments (AWS or GCP).
Ability to access federal environments and/or have access to protected federal data.
Must be able to submit documentation establishing U.S. Person status (e.g. a U.S. Citizen, National, Lawful Permanent Resident, Refugee, or Asylee. 22 CFR 120.15) upon hire.

Nice To Haves

Experience with PgBouncer, HAProxy, or other connection-pooling/load-balancing layers.
Exposure to event streaming (Kafka, Debezium) and change data capture.
Experience supporting 24/7 production environments with on-call rotation.
Contributions to open-source PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and operate highly available PostgreSQL clusters (physical replication, logical replication, sharding/partitioning, failover automation).
Optimize query performance, indexing strategies, schema design, and storage engines.
Perform capacity planning, growth forecasting, and workload modeling.
Own high-availability strategies including automatic failover, multi-AZ/multi-region setups, and disaster recovery.
Develop automation for any and all tasks including but not limited to: provisioning, configuration, backups, failovers, vacuum tuning, and schema management using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes Operators, or custom tooling.
Build monitoring, alerting, and self-healing systems for PostgreSQL and MySQL.
Lead response during database incidents—performance regressions, replication lag, deadlocks, bloat issues, storage failures, etc.
Conduct root-cause analysis and implement permanent fixes.
Partner with software engineers to review SQL, optimize schemas, and ensure efficient use of PostgreSQL features.
Provide guidance on database-related design patterns, migrations, version upgrades, and best practices.