Senior Engineer - Database Infrastructure

Hard Rock Digital•United Kingdom, ENG

About The Position

Hard Rock Digital is hiring Senior Database Infrastructure Engineers to operate and improve the databases behind its online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming platform. The role owns PostgreSQL, MySQL, and ClickHouse databases and supports the team operating CockroachDB clusters. The work spans database operations, performance, reliability, tooling, security, and architecture, with an emphasis on understanding how database engines behave internally and tracing problems across databases, application code, platforms, and architecture. The engineer will operate PostgreSQL and MySQL on Amazon RDS across production, staging, and development environments, and run ClickHouse for operational and analytical workloads. They will support CockroachDB operations, build tools and automation, improve observability, participate in data-layer on-call and incident response, and implement access controls and encryption for a regulated gaming platform. The team uses AI coding and investigation harnesses as part of its workflow, with output verified against production evidence. This role suits someone who learns systems from source code, design documents, and hands-on experiments; documents what systems actually do; and is interested in expanding their scope beyond the database where needed. The position is intended to be the employee’s main professional focus.

Requirements

At least 5 years operating production relational databases as a DBA, Database Reliability Engineer, or Data Platform Engineer.
Deep production experience with PostgreSQL and MySQL, or deep experience with one and substantial working experience with the other.
Understanding of database internals, including PostgreSQL heap and row versions, InnoDB clustered indexes and undo logs, write-ahead logging, cost-based planning, replication, failover trade-offs, and how ClickHouse differs from relational engines.
Grounding in distributed systems, including consensus, distributed transactions, and consistency models, sufficient to learn CockroachDB quickly.
Python or Go programming ability and enough Java to debug line-of-business code.
Experience with Linux, infrastructure-as-code, a monitoring stack such as Grafana, and AWS.
Willingness to participate in an on-call rota.
Clear technical writing and communication skills, including the ability to explain complex problems to engineers and product managers.
Ability and interest to make this role the main professional focus rather than one engagement among several.

Nice To Haves

Shipped Python or Go tooling for database operations, migration safety, or incident response that other engineers adopted.
Investigated production incidents end-to-end, including execution plans and source code.
Moved a workload between database engines or across major versions and can explain what was surprising.
Taken on work outside the database domain to solve a problem and influenced how another team built or shipped.
Production experience with ClickHouse, CockroachDB, or another distributed database.
Experience with Kafka, Materialize, or Snowflake.
Used AI coding agents in real work with review practices that keep output tied to evidence.

Responsibilities

Operate PostgreSQL and MySQL on Amazon RDS across production, staging, and development, including replication, failover, backup and recovery, upgrades, and engine-specific failure modes.
Run ClickHouse for operational and analytical workloads, covering table engines, sort keys, partitioning, merges, replication, and ingestion paths.
Support CockroachDB operations and take on more responsibility as knowledge of the system grows.
Trace slow queries and lock waits affecting bets, settlements, and payouts to execution plans, statistics, schemas, or application code.
Assess schema-change risk before changes reach large tables and review schemas and queries with application teams.
Build observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Mimir, and Loki; participate in the data-layer on-call rota; and lead incident analysis and blameless postmortems.
Build Python and Go tooling and automate provisioning and recovery with Terraform.
Use AI harnesses in daily work and verify their output against production facts before shipping.
Implement and audit access controls and encryption for a regulated gaming platform.
Set standards across database engines, participate in architecture reviews, and read source code when code-level investigation is needed.