At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Workplace
- Remote
- Location
- NAMER · EMEA
About the role
- We're looking for a Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) to join the State team at Zapier.
- You'll shape our practices around automation, observability, performance, reliability, and disaster recovery, and help make the right way the easy way for the teams building on top of our data layer.
- This is a senior DBRE role on the State team where you'll be the technical center of gravity for database and cache work.
Responsibilities
- Own the reliability of our caching layer: capacity planning, failover behavior, upgrade strategy, and healthy usage patterns for caches hosted in Redis Enterprise and AWS ElastiCache.
- Participate in our on-call rotation and serve as the point of escalation for data-layer issues during production incidents.
- Support internal customers day to day, from troubleshooting a slow query to advising on storage usage, and turn recurring questions into documentation and tooling.
- Manage our database and cache infrastructure as code, evolving our Terraform modules and provisioning workflows so changes are repeatable, reviewable, and safe.
- Build database and cache templated standards within our internal platform's golden path that take developers from zero to a scalable, performant, and secure setup.
- Build and maintain observability for the data layer: dashboards, alerts, and SLOs that give both our team and our internal customers a clear picture of database and cache health.
- Identify and implement strategies to improve performance and resilience across our MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis fleets.
- Work with development teams to make architectural decisions about new services and new technologies, including which engine fits the workload and where caching belongs.
- Consult with product teams on schema design, query patterns, and capacity planning so they succeed with the data layer rather than being handed rules.
- Lead design review for data-layer work and mentor engineers across the team on database and cache practice.
Requirements
- At least 7 years in systems administration, systems engineering, or software development
- At least 4 years running production relational databases
- Deep expertise in MySQL or PostgreSQL and working knowledge of the other, including each engine's ecosystem of extensions and tools
- Understanding of caching (such as Redis) as part of the data layer, how to design and operate it at scale, and the tradeoffs between caching and the database underneath
- Designed and maintained highly available, cloud-based database systems in AWS or another cloud platform
- Manage infrastructure with Terraform or similar IaC tooling rather than by hand
- Comfortable operating stateful services alongside Kubernetes or other distributed systems
- Implemented metrics, logging, and alerting for data systems using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch
Workplace
- All-remote company with locations in NAMER and EMEA
Skills
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- ElastiCache
- AWS
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
- Datadog
- Prometheus
- CloudWatch
- Redis Enterprise
