Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Clicklease•Draper, UT

About The Position

As a member of the Data Engineering team, the Senior Database Reliability Engineer will be a technical owner of the databases powering the lending platform, risk and decisioning systems, and customer-facing services. The role works alongside DBAs and Data Engineers and partners closely with DevOps, which owns cloud infrastructure, to keep production databases fast, secure, and reliable. The database environment includes self-hosted Microsoft SQL Server on AWS EC2 with a failover replica, PostgreSQL on AWS EC2 in a primary/replica configuration, and Snowflake as the data warehouse. The engineer will help shape how the data platform is built, deployed, and operated, including moving database tooling and AWS DMS resources under infrastructure-as-code with Terraform. The role is responsible for database availability, recovery, performance, monitoring, production operations, security, deployment practices, automation, and support for engineering and data teams. It includes participating in an on-call rotation and using modern AI tools and agents to accelerate database analysis, troubleshooting, scripting, and documentation.

Requirements

At least 5 years of production administration experience with SQL Server or PostgreSQL, with strong hands-on skills in the other.
Experience with high availability, disaster recovery, backup and restore, failover replicas, streaming replication, and point-in-time recovery.
Experience running self-hosted databases on AWS EC2 and Linux in partnership with DevOps.
Database performance tuning and query optimization skills.
Strong T-SQL and SQL skills, including stored procedures and functions.
Experience with instance configuration, security, roles, and routine maintenance across both database engines.
Python automation experience and working knowledge of PowerShell and Bash.
Experience using Git-based workflows with code review and staged deployments.
Strong troubleshooting skills and a calm approach to production incidents.
Strong written communication skills for runbooks, documentation, and tickets.
Experience using AI-assisted tools for database analysis and operations.

Nice To Haves

Designing database architectures that scale with the business, such as partitioning, read scaling, and capacity planning.
Windows Server administration in support of SQL Server and its services.
Monitoring and observability experience with tools such as Zabbix and Grafana.
Building or improving CI/CD pipelines for database changes.
Terraform experience, especially bringing existing resources under infrastructure-as-code.
Experience with AWS DMS or other change-data-capture and replication tools.
Experience with data warehouses such as Snowflake, ETL/ELT pipelines, or workflow orchestration tools such as Prefect or Airflow.
Experience supporting SOC 2 or similar compliance audits.
Experience in fintech, lending, payments, banking, or another highly regulated environment.

Responsibilities

Maintain stable, resilient production databases, including failover, replication, and disaster-recovery plans.
Own backup and recovery strategy and automate regular restore and failover testing.
Safely and repeatably refresh non-production environments from production data.
Monitor, troubleshoot, and tune database performance, including queries, indexes, server settings, and instance configuration.
Partner with engineers on schema design, query optimization, and efficient data processing.
Plan database capacity and growth.
Build and maintain monitoring, dashboards, and alerting to surface issues early.
Participate in an on-call rotation, respond to and resolve database incidents, and follow up with preventive fixes.
Install, configure, patch, and upgrade self-hosted database servers on EC2 using scripted, repeatable processes.
Manage access according to least-privilege principles and regularly audit roles and permissions.
Implement encryption, secure connections, and auditing to protect financial and personal data.
Review and deploy database changes and maintain and enforce database deployment best practices.
Improve GitLab CI/CD pipelines for database changes so releases are safer, faster, more automated, and SOC 2 compliant.
Write and review production data fixes carefully.
Automate routine tasks with Python and scripting, and keep runbooks and documentation current.
Provision databases for new services.
Support data engineering pipelines, including AWS DMS replication and orchestration that move operational data into Snowflake.
Help developers with database access, troubleshooting, and best practices.
Use modern AI tools and agents for performance analysis, troubleshooting, scripting, and documentation; identify useful AI opportunities and share effective workflows with the team.
Bring AWS DMS resources, including replication instances, endpoints, and tasks, under infrastructure-as-code with Terraform.
Collaborate with DevOps on database EC2 instances, storage, and networking.
Build repeatable, automated processes for database provisioning, patching, and failover.