Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Firmus; Singapore; On-site; SGD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Firmus Technologies seeks a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to own the operational datastore for Firmus AI Cloud and internal services. You will work on bare-metal, self-hosted, and cloud infrastructure, delivering reliable, scalable database platforms with low cognitive load for product teams.

You will champion HA, backup, and performance, coordinating with software engineers on migrations, data modeling, and telemetry. Join a company pushing sustainable AI infrastructure across APAC.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years in database reliability engineering.
• Deep PostgreSQL performance troubleshooting under heavy load.
• Hands-on with PostgreSQL HA/backup stacks (Patroni, pgBackRest/WAL-G) and poolers (pgBouncer).
• Production Redis or Memcached ownership with HA or clustering.
• Production experience with a document or NoSQL store (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB).
• Automates database work with infrastructure as code and Python or Go; experience with Kubernetes stateful databases.

Responsibilities

• Set and improve how we run databases for customer-facing and internal workloads.
• Automation: provisioning, config, upgrades, backup, restore, and decommissioning with IaC.
• Reliability & performance: monitor SLOs, capacity, query performance, and fix production issues.
• Security & compliance: manage access control, encryption, audit logging, and change control.
• Partnership & escalations: collaborate on schema design, migrations, data modelling, and escalations.

Skills

PostgreSQL expertise

Infrastructure as Code

Python or Go

Linux performance

Education

BSc in CS or related field

Tools

Patroni

pgBackRest

WAL-G

pgBouncer

Redis/Memcached

MongoDB

Cassandra

DynamoDB

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Firmus Technologies is a global leader pioneering the development and operation of efficient AI infrastructure across Asia Pacific.

Founded in Australia in 2019, our mission is to create the most efficient AI infrastructure by combining cutting-edge technology with a steadfast commitment to sustainability.

At Firmus, we are unique in our approach. We design, build, and operate a new class of digital infrastructure – the AI Factory. Through our model-to-grid technology approach, we have pushed the boundaries of multi-generational liquid cooling systems, energy management, AI software orchestration, and construction. For our customers, this approach allows us to make every watt count and deliver low-cost AI tokens globally.

Firmus AI Cloud

Our large-scale GPU cloud platform, Firmus AI Cloud, is purpose-built to deliver energy-efficient AI compute at scale to customers.

It empowers developers, enterprises, educational institutions, and government users to train and deploy AI models with unmatched efficiency and cost savings. With an ever-growing suite of services and applications, we are committed to delivering a cloud experience that is market-leading, proprietary, and built to scale.

ROLE SUMMARY

Firmus Technologies is seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to join our Engineering and Technology team. You will own and evolve the operational datastore platform that Firmus AI Cloud and our internal platform services depend on. The work sits on bare-metal and self-hosted infrastructure as well as cloud, with proven recovery and measurable reliability as first-class product qualities. You build a paved road so product teams can provision and change databases safely, with low cognitive load, instead of waiting on a ticket queue.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Set and improve how we run databases for customer-facing and internal platform workloads. Choose the right pattern for the job: relational, document, NoSQL, or cache. Define connection pooling and database proxies. Define how we scale with vertical growth, read replicas, sharding or partitioning, and multi-site setups. Set HA and failover standards for shared multi-tenant systems. Keep tenant isolation clear and limit blast radius when something fails.

• Automation & Lifecycle

Own provisioning, config, upgrades, backup, restore, and decommissioning with infrastructure as code and solid automation. Set RPO and RTO. Prove restore and failover with regular drills. Give product teams safe self-service for routine database work so they do not wait on you for every change.

• Reliability & Performance

Own production health across on-premises and cloud database: SLOs, capacity, query performance, and database monitoring. Fix hard production issues such as lock contention, replication lag, memory or storage pressure, slow queries, and storage or network bottlenecks. Join on-call, lead post-mortems, and turn fixes into automation or better runbooks. Track storage and compute cost when you plan capacity.

• Security & Compliance

Own access control, encryption in transit and at rest, audit logging, and change control for the databases. Extend Firmus SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 2701 controls as we add sites and services. Keep backup, restore, and recovery evidence ready for audit. Keep privileged access tight.

• Partnership & Escalations

Work with software and platform engineers on schema design, safe migrations, data modelling, and performance reviews before release. Work with data engineering and observability where your databases connect to their systems, such as CDC (Change Data Capture), read replicas, and database telemetry. Run design reviews that raise the bar. Join customer escalations when the issue is database reliability, performance, or recovery.

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years in database reliability engineering. At least 3 years owning PostgreSQL in large-scale production, such as high concurrency, large datasets, or multi-tenant services. That includes replication, failover, backup and restore, query tuning, and incidents you owned.
• Deep PostgreSQL performance troubleshooting under load, including planner behaviour, locking, bloat, and connection storms.
• Hands-on with a PostgreSQL HA and backup stack such as Patroni-style HA, pgBackRest or WAL-G, and pgBouncer or a similar pooler. Has shipped schema or major version changes under load.
• Production Redis or Memcached ownership. Has run it with HA or clustering, managed memory and eviction under load, and made clear persistence and failover choices.
• Production experience with at least one document or NoSQL store such as MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, or similar. Includes HA or replica setup, backup and restore, and at least one failure mode you diagnosed yourself.
• Automates database work with infrastructure as code and Python or Go. Experience with stateful databases on Kubernetes and operators is valued.
• Has defined RPO and RTO, run restore and failover drills, and owned SLOs, on-call, and post-mortems that led to lasting fixes.
• Understands the Linux storage and network path that affects database performance. Has used Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry , or similar for database monitoring.
• Has operated databases under compliance such as SOC 2 Type 2 or ISO 2701 .
• Willing to take part in the incident-response on-call rotation for the databases you own.
• Willing to travel overseas occasionally when the role requires it.
• Clear and effective written and verbal communication in English.

Location & Reporting

• Report to: Senior Manager, Platform Engineering

Employment Basis

Full-time

Diversity

At Firmus, we are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds who are passionate about creating a more sustainable future through innovative engineering solutions.