Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE)

Centraprise; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Cisco Meraki is seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to design, operate, and scale PostgreSQL-backed data services in a remote-friendly environment. You will join SRE, security, and software teams to improve availability, performance, and reliability across relational databases, streaming systems, and analytical stores.

You will administer PostgreSQL infrastructure, implement ETL pipelines, perform backups, monitor capacity, and contribute to on-call rotations.

Qualifications

• 5+ years designing, operating, and troubleshooting PostgreSQL in production.
• 5+ years managing production databases or distributed data systems.
• 3+ years Linux systems engineering and automation with Terraform/Ansible/Chef/Puppet.
• 2+ years scripting for automation (Python/Bash/Go/Ruby/Perl).
• Experience with non-PostgreSQL systems (Kafka/MSK, ClickHouse, Redis, MySQL, Cassandra, Elasticsearch).

Responsibilities

• Plan, administer, maintain, and secure PostgreSQL infrastructure with SRE teams for high performance.
• Design, build, and maintain ETL pipelines for PostgreSQL and data migration procedures.
• Perform operations like installation, upgrades, backups, monitoring, capacity planning in cloud.
• Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, monitoring, and post-incident reviews.

Skills

PostgreSQL

Cloud infra

Linux systems engineering

Scripting (Python, Bash, Go, Ruby, or:

Security & Secrets mgmt

Tools

Kubernetes

Amazon RDS

AWS

Terraform

Secrets management

Kafka/MSK

ClickHouse

Redis

MySQL

Cassandra

Elasticsearch

Job description

Position: Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE)

Location: REMOTE

Must Have Technical/Functional Skills

• 5+ years of experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting PostgreSQL in production environments with previous work with cloud infrastructure and managed data services, including PostgreSQL on Kubernetes, Amazon RDS, AWS, Terraform, service discovery, and secrets management.
• 5+ years of experience managing production database or distributed data systems across application, database, operating system, storage, and network layers.
• 3+ years of experience in Linux systems engineering (performance tuning, memory management, I/O tuning, configuration, security, and networking) and automating infrastructure or database operations with tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet.
• 2+ years of experience using at least one scripting or programming language such as Python, Bash, Go, Ruby, or Perl for automation and operational tooling.
• Experience working in a polyglot production data environment, including at least one non-PostgreSQL system such as Kafka/MSK, ClickHouse, Redis, MySQL, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, or a similar distributed data system.

As a Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you will help make Meraki's database and data systems reliable, scalable, secure, and operable. You will combine database engineering, reliability engineering, and platform automation to support relational databases, streaming systems, analytical stores, and low-latency data services.

You will work closely with SRE, application engineering, security, and infrastructure teams to improve the availability and performance of our data systems, reduce operational toil, and guide safe architectural changes as the platform grows.

• Plan, administer, maintain, and secure the PostgreSQL infrastructure in collaboration with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to ensure high performance and reliability.
• Design, build, and maintain ETL pipelines for PostgreSQL, as well as develop procedures and scripts for data migration.
• Perform operational database administration tasks such as installation, upgrades, patching, backup/recovery, monitoring, capacity planning, and architectural changes in cloud environments.
• Participate in production operations such as on-call rotation, incident response, monitoring, alerting, and post-incident review processes.

Good to Have:

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building database platform tooling, self-service workflows, and paved paths that enable application teams to use data systems safely and efficiently.
• Ability to operate MSK/Kafka, ClickHouse, or Redis at scale, covering cluster operations, replication, partitioning or sharding, retention, capacity planning, and workload tuning.
• Previous responsibility for refining reliability practices for production data systems, such as SLOs, disaster recovery plans, backup validation, and failover testing.
• Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals and operational behavior, including concurrency, transaction consistency, replication, maintenance, backup and recovery, indexing, and query performance.
• Ability to communicate effectively in writing and verbally by producing design documents, leading.