Senior Database Reliability Engineer

AppDirect • Montreal, QC

25d

About The Position

AppDirect is seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to join their Data Platform team. This role involves working at the intersection of highly scalable, fault-tolerant data services and modern cloud infrastructure. The engineer will tackle complex challenges in database reliability, migrations, and platform automation, contributing to the evolution of the cloud-native data environment. The position emphasizes building self-healing systems, guiding engineers on data store selection, and creating documentation and patterns to accelerate others' work. The Data Platform team's mission is to provide reliable, secure, and scalable data infrastructure as a service, treating it as a product that engineering teams can depend on. They support over 80 data stores and focus on resiliency, security, operational excellence, and performance. The team is also investing in AI-assisted operations, self-service tooling, and lakehouse modernization.

Requirements

• Strong understanding of AI-assisted development workflows, with proven hands-on experience using tools such as Cursor, Claude, to improve efficiency, automation, and code quality.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience running and operating MySQL and/or PostgreSQL in large-scale production environments, with deep knowledge of database internals
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with NoSQL—one of MongoDB, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
• 2+ years of experience with AWS cloud services.
• Strong expertise in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), with a primary focus on Terraform.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Strong communication skills for explaining complex technical topics to peers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working in a distributed team.

Nice To Haves

• Strong preferred exposure to lakehouse and analytics infrastructure (e.g., Databricks, Apache Iceberg, Unity Catalog) with an interest in collaborating with Data Insights on lakehouse enablement.

Responsibilities

• Lead large-scale database migration projects driven by company acquisitions, client onboarding, and platform growth—planning for minimal downtime, strong rollback strategies, and zero data loss.
• Design and execute deployment strategies for blue/green rollouts, data archiving, and partitioning across relational, key-value, and document data stores.
• Use AI-powered automation to strengthen our data platform across our quality pillars: operational excellence, security and compliance, performance and scalability, and resiliency and capacity planning.
• Apply AI-assisted development tools and spec-driven workflows to design, automate, and ship database platform changes faster—Terraform modules, runbooks, diagnostics, and operational tooling—with clear acceptance criteria and high code quality.
• Partner with the Data Insights team on lakehouse enablement (e.g., Databricks, Apache Iceberg, Unity Catalog)—bridging transactional data stores and analytics infrastructure through reliable access patterns, security/governance alignment, and safe onboarding of workloads onto the lakehouse.
• Guide engineers in delivering fit-for-purpose database solutions across relational (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server), key-value (Redis), document (MongoDB), and search (Elasticsearch).
• Maintain a strong culture of documentation by developing and sharing high-quality knowledge resources for engineers and AI-assisted workflows.
• Participate in incident response and on-call rotation to maintain data infrastructure health.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed