Sr. Database Reliability Engineer II

NinjaTrader•Chicago, IL

2d•$130,000 - $180,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Sr. Database Reliability Engineer II, you will help architect, evolve, and optimize the data platform powering NinjaTrader's core trading applications. This is not a traditional Database Administrator (DBA) role. We're looking for a software engineer with deep MySQL/Postgres expertise who enjoys solving complex data challenges while remaining actively involved in software development. You'll partner closely with software engineers, architects, and platform teams to improve database performance, evolve our data architecture, build developer tooling, and establish engineering best practices that enable our platform to continue scaling. You'll play a key role in shaping the future direction of our data platform by driving initiatives that improve scalability, resiliency, developer productivity, and operational excellence. This role is ideal for someone who has spent their career building production software and naturally became the database expert responsible for solving performance bottlenecks, designing scalable schemas, and improving application reliability.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
8+ years of professional software engineering experience
Strong experience building backend applications using Java, C#, Go, Python, Kotlin, Scala, or similar modern programming languages
Expert-level experience with MySQL in large-scale production environments
Deep understanding of: SQL optimization, Query execution plans, Indexing strategies, Transactions and isolation levels, Locking and concurrency, Schema design and normalization, Replication and high availability
Experience designing scalable database schemas for high-volume transactional applications
Experience troubleshooting complex application and database performance issues
Experience implementing database migration strategies supporting continuous delivery
Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, and engineering best practices
Experience leading technical initiatives and influencing architectural decisions across engineering teams
Excellent collaboration and communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineers and cross-functional stakeholders
Passion for improving developer productivity by building automation, developer tooling, database testing frameworks, performance benchmarking harnesses, and engineering best practices.

Nice To Haves

Experience building and operating applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Experience with Cloud SQL for MySQL
Experience using Google Cloud services such as Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Secret Manager, Cloud Build, or Cloud Deploy
Experience supporting financial services, trading platforms, or other high-throughput transactional systems
Experience working in startup or high-growth engineering environments where engineers owned both application development and database performance
Experience improving developer productivity through tooling and automation
Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems
Experience implementing observability solutions, performance monitoring, and database telemetry
Experience leveraging AI/ML tools or technologies to improve software development, operational efficiency, or engineering productivity

Responsibilities

Design and evolve MySQL schemas supporting high-volume transactional workloads
Define and drive improvements to NinjaTrader's data platform architecture, including online schema changes, zero/low-downtime database migrations, blue/green deployments, and scalability initiatives that support long-term platform growth.
Analyze and optimize SQL queries, indexes, and execution plans to improve application performance
Develop production-quality software that improves our persistence layer, developer tooling, and data platform capabilities
Design scalable data models that balance performance, maintainability, and long-term growth
Build reusable libraries, frameworks, and tooling that simplify data access and improve developer productivity across engineering teams
Lead database performance tuning initiatives across applications and services
Drive modernization initiatives for database architecture, deployment processes, and operational reliability
Design and implement safe, repeatable database migration strategies supporting continuous delivery
Investigate and resolve complex production issues involving application performance, database behavior, locking, concurrency, and data integrity
Establish engineering standards and best practices for schema design, indexing, SQL development, database migrations, and data access patterns
Partner with Platform Engineering to improve database monitoring, backup strategies, disaster recovery, and operational resilience
Leverage Google Cloud Platform services, including Cloud SQL, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, and related tooling, to improve the reliability, scalability, and observability of our data platform
Mentor engineers on data modeling, SQL optimization, MySQL best practices, and application performance optimization
Lead technical design discussions and architecture reviews related to database-backed applications
Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend solutions that improve platform scalability, maintainability, and engineering efficiency
Serve as a technical leader and trusted advisor for database architecture, application performance, and data platform best practices