Senior Database Reliability Engineer

We are looking for someone who can ship production-quality engineering work , not just advise from the sidelines. With AI tooling and automation, you should be a force multiplier for database reliability, developer productivity, and operational excellence across Sezzle. Compensation : For this senior development role, with 6+ years of experience, the compensation range is $5,000 - $9,500 USD per month. This range acknowledges the extensive expertise, leadership capabilities, and significant contributions expected at this level, offering a competitive salary to reflect the value of advanced skills and experience. What You'll Do: Design, build, and maintain shared database platform components used by Sezzle applications, such as database connection packages, database client libraries, migration tooling, safety checks, query standards, and developer-facing abstractions. Establish reliable, scalable patterns for how Sezzle services connect to and interact with relational databases across production, staging, and development environments. Partner with backend engineering teams to improve database usage in application code, including connection lifecycle, transaction handling, retries, timeouts, pooling, query patterns, and migration workflows. Build automation and internal tooling that makes database operations safer, more repeatable, and less dependent on manual intervention. Define and enforce engineering standards for database access, schema design, migrations, indexing, query performance, connection management, and operational readiness. Architect and improve database infrastructure across AWS RDS/Aurora MySQL, PostgreSQL, RDS Proxy, read replicas, backups, failover, parameter groups, monitoring, and capacity planning. Lead database reliability initiatives that reduce operational risk, improve performance, and help Sezzle scale safely. Review application designs and database changes early in the development lifecycle to ensure reliability, scalability, maintainability, and security are built in from the start. Build guardrails for database migrations , including automated checks, rollback expectations, schema review workflows, migration observability, and production safety controls. Improve developer self-service for database provisioning, access, schema management, local development, testing, and observability. Investigate production database issues by combining application telemetry, database metrics, logs, query plans, traces, and cloud infrastructure data. Identify and fix systemic database problems , not just symptoms — including bad access patterns, unsafe migrations, inefficient queries, connection storms, lock contention, replication lag, and capacity bottlenecks. Create and maintain high-signal dashboards, alerts, SLOs, SLIs, runbooks, and operational readiness checks for database-backed services. Drive improvements in database backup validation, restore testing, disaster recovery, failover readiness, and business continuity. Work with security and compliance teams to improve database access controls, auditability, encryption, secrets management, least privilege, and PCI/SOC 2 aligned controls. Mentor engineers on database design, query performance, safe migrations, operational readiness, and production debugging. Use automation and AI tooling where appropriate to improve migration review, query analysis, incident investigation, documentation, and developer productivity. What We look for: 6+ years of professional software engineering, infrastructure engineering, database engineering, SRE, or platform engineering experience. Strong software engineering ability in at least one production programming language such as Go, Python, or TypeScript . Proven ability to build production-quality internal tools, libraries, frameworks, services, or platform components used by other engineers. Deep hands-on experience with relational databases, especially MySQL and/or PostgreSQL, in high-availability production environments. Strong understanding of how application code interacts with databases , including connection pooling, transactions, isolation levels, retries, timeouts, deadlocks, locking, migrations, and query execution. Experience designing or improving shared database access patterns, internal database packages, ORM wrappers, migration frameworks, or developer-facing database tooling . Hands-on experience with AWS RDS/Aurora, including provisioning, upgrades, replicas, backups, failover, monitoring, parameter tuning, and production troubleshooting. Experience with database connection management technologies such as RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, ProxySQL, or application-level pooling. Strong ability to analyze database performance using query plans, indexes, slow query logs, wait events, locks, metrics, and application traces. Experience designing safe database migration processes for production systems. Strong understanding of observability for database-backed applications, including metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, alerting, and incident response. Experience with infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD systems such as Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Kubernetes, Helm, or similar tooling. Ability to influence engineering teams through clear design reviews, documentation, technical standards, and practical implementation. Ability to operate independently, identify high-impact problems, propose pragmatic solutions, and drive them to completion. Demonstrated experience working with Claude or equivalent large language model tools is required; candidates must be comfortable leveraging AI to enhance productivity, research, and communication. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Preferred Knowledge and Skills: Experience building platform capabilities for a microservices environment . Experience with Golang application development and database access patterns. Experience creating database libraries, SDKs, service templates, migration frameworks, or paved-road developer tooling . Experience improving database reliabili