Staff Database Reliability Engineer

Air

10d

About The Position

Air is a Creative Ops System for creative teams. Our product automates the mindless tasks that creatives and marketers do every day to manage content and unlocks creativity through image recognition, automated versioning, and approval workflows. We launched in March 2021 and have raised +$70m from world-class venture capital groups including Avenir, Tiger Global, Headline Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, WndrCo, and Slack Ventures. THE ROLE As a Staff Database Reliability Engineer, you will own the performance, reliability, and scaling strategy for our PostgreSQL Aurora infrastructure that powers creative workflows for leading brands. As a technical leader, you'll partner closely with backend engineering and leadership to architect scalable solutions, establish best-in-class database operations practices, and build the observability framework that keeps Air running at 99.99%+ uptime.

Requirements

Experience: 5+ years using PostgreSQL and working with Distributed Database.
Technical Ability: Proficient in Postgres Database operations, tuning and query optimization. Familiar with database observability tooling and establishing best practices around health metric. Familiar with AWS Aurora or RDS.
Entrepreneurial Drive: You like to work in public, own problems end-to-end, and move with intentional speed - so your best ideas ship fast and make a visible dent.
Obsessed with Winning: Everyone at Air plays to win, says the hard thing, and progresses every day while building genuine relationships.

Responsibilities

Ensure Database Reliability & Performance
Own the health, performance, and availability of Air's PostgreSQL Aurora infrastructure.
Proactively optimize database parameters, indexes, and query patterns to maintain sub-100ms p95 response times
Uplevel migration practices and tooling to ensure zero-downtime schema changes as the platform scales
Establish and maintain comprehensive backup, recovery, and disaster recovery procedures with documented RTO/RPO targets
Partner with backend engineers to implement database best practices in application code (connection pooling, query optimization, caching strategies)
Plan and Execute Long-Term Scaling Strategy
Develop multi-quarter roadmap to scale Air's database infrastructure to support 10x growth in asset volume and user activity.
Collaborate with backend engineers and product leadership to model data growth patterns and anticipate scaling inflection points
Evaluate and implement horizontal scaling strategies (read replicas, sharding, partitioning) aligned with business needs
Continuously assess AWS Aurora capabilities, PostgreSQL ecosystem innovations, and emerging database technologies for strategic advantage
Design and implement database architecture that supports Air's AI-powered features and real-time creative workflows
Build Observability and Data Health Framework
Create comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and reporting systems to maintain database reliability and inform data-driven infrastructure decisions.
Implement detailed instrumentation for database performance metrics (query latency, connection pool utilization, replication lag, disk I/O)
Build automated alerting for anomalies in query performance, connection patterns, and resource utilization
Create executive-level dashboards showing database health trends, capacity utilization, and cost efficiency
Develop regular database health review cadence with engineering leadership to surface insights and drive continuous improvement

Benefits

Growth and Impact: Join a rapidly scaling company with a mission to transform the creative ops space. Your work will have a direct, tangible impact on [our ARR growth].
Comprehensive Benefits: We offer competitive medical, dental, and vision insurance, along with dependent coverage. You’ll also enjoy a generous work-from-home stipend, professional development reimbursement, and unlimited vacation days.
Commitment to Diversity: We believe in the power of diverse perspectives and strive to create an inclusive culture that welcomes individuals from all backgrounds and experiences.
Competitive Compensation:

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