Senior Database Reliability Engineer (PostgreSQL)

Medallia • Pleasanton, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Database Services team at Medallia owns the production database systems that power a highly reliable global SaaS platform. Database Reliability Engineers (DBREs) are responsible for the availability, performance, and lifecycle of those systems, and for the platform capabilities that let engineering teams consume database services safely. We work as peers to Site Reliability Engineering, with the same expectations for reliability, incident response, and automation applied to the data layer. PostgreSQL is the largest part of our estate, and the team is evolving to support additional database technologies, primarily YugabyteDB and Apache Cassandra. Our databases run mostly in Kubernetes environments hosted in Medallia Cloud. We are currently looking for a Senior Database Reliability Engineer who combines deep PostgreSQL expertise with an automation mindset. A substantial part of the role is hands-on production work: operating clusters, diagnosing incidents, tuning performance, and executing upgrades. You will use that experience to identify recurring operational pain, fix the underlying causes, and turn repeatable procedures into automation the whole team relies on. As a Senior DBRE you will lead incident reviews, define service objectives for the platform, and mentor other DBREs.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience running PostgreSQL in large-scale production or SaaS environments.
• Demonstrated technical knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, including MVCC, vacuum, WAL, locking, concurrency, and query planning.
• Production experience managing PostgreSQL database operations, including: Capacity planning, Backup, point-in-time recovery, and restore validation, Replication and high availability, Major-version upgrades, Indexing, SQL tuning, partitioning, and performance tuning, Schema migrations, and reviewing query changes for production impact.
• Incident response and root-cause analysis for customer-facing production systems.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional engineering teams.
• Availability to participate in on-call rotations and scheduled maintenance windows.
• Fluency in English, both spoken and written.

Nice To Haves

• Operating PostgreSQL at scale, such as multi-terabyte databases or fleets of hundreds of clusters.
• Designing and automating partitioning schemes for high-volume tables.
• Patroni or a comparable PostgreSQL HA stack in production.
• Connection pooling and load balancing for PostgreSQL, such as PgBouncer or equivalent.
• Zero- or near-zero-downtime operations on production PostgreSQL, including schema migrations, partitioning of multi-terabyte tables, and cross-cluster migrations.
• Zero- or near-zero-downtime major-version upgrades using logical replication, pg_upgrade, or similar.
• Running PostgreSQL clusters in Kubernetes or other containerized environments.
• Linux OS fundamentals.
• CI/CD and GitOps tools such as Jenkins and ArgoCD.
• Infrastructure-as-code and configuration management using Ansible.
• Building automation, tooling, or services used in production using Python.
• Observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or OpenTelemetry.
• Public cloud platforms, particularly OCI.
• YugabyteDB or Apache Cassandra.

Responsibilities

• Own the availability and performance of production PostgreSQL clusters, measured against defined service level objectives.
• Own the database lifecycle: provisioning, configuration, maintenance, major-version upgrades, scaling, and decommissioning.
• Own backup, recovery, replication, and high availability, including regular restore tests and failover drills against agreed recovery point and recovery time objectives.
• Manage capacity planning and growth of the PostgreSQL estate.
• Build monitoring and alerting that reflects symptoms and service objectives rather than individual failures, and keep operational noise low.
• Build production-quality automation, tooling, and services that replace recurring manual procedures across the database lifecycle.
• Build standardized, supported workflows and self-service capabilities so engineering teams can provision and operate databases with less direct DBRE involvement.
• Collaborate with product-engineering teams: review schema migrations and query patterns, and guide them on PostgreSQL best practices.
• Troubleshoot complex problems that span the database, operating system, network, and application layers.
• Lead incident response for database systems, followed by blameless root-cause analysis and permanent corrective actions.
• Use AI-assisted engineering tools where they accelerate troubleshooting, automation, and documentation.
• Mentor other DBREs and review technical work.
• Maintain runbooks and documentation that others can follow and progressively automate.
• Be part of the Database Services on-call rotation and planned maintenance windows.

Benefits

• medical
• dental
• vision
• 401(k)
• short-term and long-term disability
• life and AD&D insurance
• statutory leaves
• paid parental leave
• paid holidays

What This Job Offers

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