Staff Database Reliability Engineer
About The Position
Reporting to the Manager, DevOps Engineering, the Staff Database Reliability Engineer leads the architecture, reliability, and operational excellence of Checkr’s core data stores. The role owns database capacity planning, financial forecasting, high availability, disaster recovery, and infrastructure-as-code automation across high-scale distributed data stores. Working with Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Core Services, and Product Engineering, this position establishes fleet-wide data governance and performance standards to support the platform’s growth. AI tooling is used in day-to-day work. The role is expected to work from a Checkr office hub at least three days per week. Hub locations are Denver, San Francisco, Nashville, and Santiago. A relocation stipend may be available for candidates willing to relocate to a hub.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 10+ years of experience designing, administering, and scaling relational and non-relational database storage architectures in production environments.
- Deep expertise managing and tuning MongoDB and PostgreSQL or MySQL database topologies at high volume and scale.
- Understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including data structures and software design principles, and ability to apply them to technical challenges.
- Extensive hands-on experience with AWS database and storage ecosystems, including RDS, Aurora, ElastiCache, MongoDB Atlas, and S3.
- Demonstrated experience automating cloud infrastructure and database operations using Terraform, Terragrunt, and modern scripting languages.
- Strong technical leadership skills and a proven ability to guide engineering teams through database schema design, zero-downtime migrations such as gh-ost, and security compliance standards.
- Bias for action, ownership, resilience through ambiguity, urgency, and focus on meaningful outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Lead architectural design, high-availability strategies including multi-region deployments, and business continuity and disaster recovery solutions across Checkr’s multi-cloud database fleet.
- Mentor and grow engineers, and promote high standards across the team.
- Set the long-term vision and strategy for database architecture, communicate it to engineers and leadership, and propose projects that advance it.
- Ensure sensitive data is protected through encryption and security-first architecture.
- Provision, scale, and maintain cloud database systems across production, staging, and sandbox environments using Infrastructure as Code.
- Optimize database performance at the query, schema, connection, and instance levels across PostgreSQL or MySQL and MongoDB workloads.
- Partner with Site Reliability Engineering to build proactive observability, automated alerting, and diagnostic tooling for database health and performance.
- Automate operational toil, maintenance workflows, schema migrations, and backup lifecycle policies.
- Lead diagnosis and resolution of incidents and post-incident reviews for critical database alerts and outages across customer-serving infrastructure.
Benefits
- Learning and development allowance.
- Competitive cash and equity compensation, with opportunity for advancement.
- 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Up to $25K reimbursement for fertility, adoption, and parental planning services.
- Flexible PTO policy.
- Monthly wellness stipend.
- In-office lunch five times a week, commuter stipend, snacks, and beverages.
- Relocation stipend may be available for those willing to relocate to a Checkr hub.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
