Senior Database Reliability Engineer

MUFG Investor Services•Toronto, ON

6d•CA$85,680 - CA$130,000•Remote

About The Position

We are looking for a Database Reliability Engineer to join our team. This is not a traditional DBA role — you are a DevOps engineer who happens to have deep SQL and database knowledge. You think in code, manage infrastructure via Terraform, and treat database provisioning, patching, and performance as an engineering problem — not a manual task. You will own the database infrastructure layer across our AWS environments: provisioning, scaling, observability, and reliability — all through Infrastructure-as-Code. Our current estate includes SQL Server running on Windows EC2 instances. You will partner with application teams to ensure databases are correctly provisioned, optimised, and monitored without becoming a gatekeeper.

Requirements

Strong SQL — complex queries, performance tuning, indexing, EXPLAIN plans
AWS — RDS Aurora, Secrets Manager, IAM, CloudWatch, VPC networking for databases, KMS encryption
Terraform — writing and maintaining modules, state management, remote backends, version pinning
Scripting — Python or Bash for automation, operational tooling, and migration scripts
CI/CD — GitLab CI or equivalent; using pipelines for infrastructure changes and database migrations
Observability — experience with Datadog, CloudWatch, or Prometheus/Grafana for database metrics and alerting
Linux — comfortable with system-level troubleshooting in production environments

Nice To Haves

PostgreSQL — deep knowledge: vacuuming, autovacuum tuning, replication (logical/streaming), pg_stat views, extensions
PgBouncer or RDS Proxy — connection pooling configuration and tuning
Kubernetes — understanding how workloads connect to databases, sidecar patterns, secrets injection
Database migrations — zero-downtime schema migrations with tools like Flyway, Liquibase, or custom scripted approaches
Financial services or regulated environments — familiarity with audit logging, data residency requirements, PCI DSS / SOC 2 controls
AWS Aurora Global Database — cross-region replication, disaster recovery patterns

Responsibilities

Provision and manage AWS RDS instances entirely through Terraform — parameter groups, subnet groups, IAM authentication, secrets rotation, multi-AZ, and read replicas
Own database reliability — design runbooks, define SLOs, set up alerting on slow queries, connection pool saturation, replication lag, and disk growth
Automate database operations — schema migrations, backup validation, failover drills, and patching via CI/CD pipelines
Improve performance — work with development teams on EXPLAIN ANALYZE, query tuning, indexing strategies, and connection pooling (PgBouncer/RDS Proxy)
Secure the data layer — enforce encryption at rest/in transit, IAM database authentication, credential rotation via AWS Secrets Manager, and least-privilege access patterns
Contribute to the platform — build reusable Terraform modules for database provisioning that application teams self-serve from the platform
Participate in on-call rotation — respond to database incidents, drive RCAs, and implement permanent fixes to prevent recurrence