Staff Database Engineer

Solvd

1d • $170,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Solvd Inc. is hiring multiple Staff Database Engineers for a program migrating a Tier-1 US payments platform from a single AWS region to a multi-region architecture. The engineers will implement DynamoDB replication, failover, and operational tooling under the Principal Database Architect, partnering with the client's data and SRE teams.

The role focuses on building and operating reliable cross-region data replication, disaster recovery, and observability, as well as supporting data extraction from a monolith into microservices. Engineers will work with infrastructure as code, AWS database and messaging services, and application teams. They will produce design documents and runbooks for handover to the client team.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of production database engineering experience on AWS, with hands-on responsibility for payments, banking, brokerage, or comparable financial-services workloads.
• Deep production experience with DynamoDB and at least two of Aurora MySQL, Cassandra, ElastiCache (Redis or Valkey), DocumentDB, and Neptune; working knowledge of at least two additional databases from this list.
• Practical production experience with cross-region replication using DynamoDB Global Tables, including configuring and operating multi-region deployments and handling replication conflicts, regional outages, replication delays, and consistency or version-skew issues.
• Strong Terraform or CDK skills, including the ability to build a multi-region module from scratch and explain its trade-offs.
• Comfort with CDC tooling such as DMS, DynamoDB Streams, Kafka Connect, or Debezium, and operational concerns such as schema drift, ordering guarantees, and replay.
• Linux and networking fundamentals, including VPC, Transit Gateway, peering, and DNS.
• Proficiency with IAM and KMS.
• Strong written communication and ability to work in a regulated client environment.

Nice To Haves

• Cassandra multi-data-center operations at scale, including nodetool workflows, repair strategy, tombstone management, and cross-region anti-entropy.
• AWS MSK or Kafka MirrorMaker 2 experience for cross-region event replication.
• Experience with Datadog Database Monitoring and custom CloudWatch metrics.
• AWS Database Specialty or Solutions Architect Associate or Professional certifications.

Responsibilities

• Implement and operate cross-region replication with Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables, supporting reliable replication, high availability, consistency, and disaster recovery.
• Codify infrastructure using Terraform or CDK.
• Build replication-health observability, including lag metrics, consistency checks, alarm thresholds, and runbook automation, using Datadog and CloudWatch.
• Author and execute failover and failback runbooks; conduct game-days with AWS Fault Injection Service and measure and report against RTO and RPO targets.
• Implement KMS cross-account replication, IAM service principals for replication roles, and strategies for secrets and parameters required by region-local dependencies.
• Support data extraction from the monolith into microservices by building CDC pipelines with tools such as DMS, DynamoDB Streams, Kafka Connect, and Debezium; validate data integrity and own cutover sequences for individual extractions.
• Partner with application engineers on connection-string abstraction, retry and idempotency patterns, and graceful degradation during regional failover.
• Write design documents and runbooks that the client team can use after the engagement.

Benefits

• Equal opportunities for collaboration across continents and cultures.
• An inclusive environment that prioritizes continuous learning, innovation, and ethical AI standards.

What This Job Offers

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