Senior Data Platform Engineer: Self-Service & SRE

Sierra Ventures; United States; Hybrid; USD 126,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Annual bonus

Equity grant

Health plans

401K

Parental Leave

Flexible time off

Job summary

Gemini is a global crypto and Web3 platform seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to act as the SRE for our data infrastructure, responsible for reliability, automation, and operability of the database and datastore fleet. You will work with data and product teams to build self-service foundations that let teams provision, scale, and operate datastores safely.

Your role centers on deep relational database expertise (PostgreSQL, Aurora) with automation-first discipline extended to NoSQL,

Qualifications

• 5 years of professional data engineering or SRE experience.
• Deep expertise with relational databases (PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora) including replication and failover.
• Experience building automation and self-service tooling to reduce manual ops.
• Hands-on with at least one NoSQL, columnar, or key-value datastore.
• Familiarity with cloud data services (AWS RDS/Redshift, BigQuery, Databricks).
• Experience with Terraform for IaC and automation.
• Proficiency in Python or Go for scripting.
• Knowledge of CI/CD, observability, SLOs, and incident response.
• Experience with data pipelines and streaming (Kafka, Kinesis).

Responsibilities

• Automation and Reliability Engineering: Build IaC, CLI tools, and CI/CD-driven automation that makes database provisioning, scaling, failover, and deployment self-service, consistent, and repeatable across environments - this is the core of the role, not a supporting activity.
• Database Scaling and Optimization: Serve as the team's depth on relational database systems (e.g., Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL) - replication topologies, failover, backup/recovery, and query/engine-level performance - ensuring high performance and availability under growing workloads.
• Fleet-Wide Infrastructure Design: Extend operational rigor to the rest of the datastore fleet - document, key-value, and columnar systems - applying the right paradigm to the right workload and building common tooling and guardrails across all of them.
• High Availability, Observability, and SRE Practice: Define and track SLOs/error budgets, build proactive monitoring and alerting, implement high-availability architectures, and participate in the on-call rotation to troubleshoot and resolve production issues quickly.
• Pipeline Integration: Collaborate with data and product engineering teams to integrate with upstream and downstream pipelines - both real-time and batch - via message queues (e.g., Kafka), ETL workflows, and processing frameworks.
• Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting: Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks at both the query and infrastructure levels across engines. Establish alerting, observability, and incident response procedures that reduce MTTR and maintain service health.
• Toil Reduction and Operational Excellence: Continuously identify and automate away repetitive operational work; contribute to shared documentation, incident retrospectives, and platform playbooks to improve team effectiveness and reliability of operations.

Skills

PostgreSQL

Amazon Aurora

NoSQL

Terraform

Python

Tools

Kafka

Kinesis

Terraform

Job description

Gemini is a global crypto and Web3 platform seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to act as the SRE for our data infrastructure, responsible for reliability, automation, and operability of the database and datastore fleet. You will work with data and product teams to build self-service foundations that let teams provision, scale, and operate datastores safely.

Your role centers on deep relational database expertise (PostgreSQL, Aurora) with automation-first discipline extended to NoSQL,