Senior PostgreSQL Reliability Engineer (Hybrid)

Medallia; Pleasanton (CA); Hybrid; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision care

401(k)

Short-term disability

Long-term disability

Life and AD&D insurance

Paid parental leave

Paid holidays

Job summary

Medallia is seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to join the Database Services team. You will own production PostgreSQL clusters, drive reliability, performance, and lifecycle management in a Kubernetes-based Medallia Cloud environment.

As a hands-on DBRE, you will lead incident reviews, define service objectives, mentor peers, and build automation to reduce manual toil. Hybrid work with some onsite days is offered, and collaboration with cross-functional teams is essential.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience running PostgreSQL in large-scale production or SaaS environments.
• Demonstrated technical knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, including MVCC, vacuum, WAL, locking, concurrency, and query planning.
• Production experience managing PostgreSQL database operations, including: Capacity planning.
• Replication and high availability.
• Major-version upgrades.
• Indexing, SQL tuning, partitioning, and performance tuning.
• Schema migrations, and reviewing query changes for production impact.
• Incident response and root-cause analysis for customer-facing production systems.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional engineering teams.
• Availability to participate in on-call rotations and scheduled maintenance windows.
• Fluency in English, both spoken and written.

Responsibilities

• Own the availability and performance of production PostgreSQL clusters, measured against defined service level objectives.
• Own the database lifecycle: provisioning, configuration, maintenance, major-version upgrades, scaling, and decommissioning.
• Own backup, recovery, replication, and high availability, including regular restore tests and failover drills against agreed recovery point and recovery time objectives.
• Manage capacity planning and growth of the PostgreSQL estate.
• Build monitoring and alerting that reflects symptoms and service objectives rather than individual failures, and keep operational noise low.
• Build production-quality automation, tooling, and services that replace recurring manual procedures across the database lifecycle.
• Build standardized, supported workflows and self-service capabilities so engineering teams can provision and operate databases with less direct DBRE involvement.
• Collaborate with product-engineering teams: review schema migrations and query patterns, and guide them on PostgreSQL best practices.
• Troubleshoot complex problems that span the database, operating system, network, and application layers.
• Lead incident response for database systems, followed by blameless root-cause analysis and permanent corrective actions.
• Use AI-assisted engineering tools where they accelerate troubleshooting, automation, and documentation.
• Mentor other DBREs and review technical work.
• Maintain runbooks and documentation that others can follow and progressivelyautomate.
• Be part of the Database Services on-call rotation and planned maintenance windows.

Skills

PostgreSQL experience

PostgreSQL internals

MVCC

WAL

Replication

High availability

Upgrades

SQL tuning

Partitioning

Indexing

Schema migrations

Incident response

Cross-functional collaboration

On-call readiness

English fluency

Tools

Patroni

PgBouncer

Kubernetes

Linux

Jenkins

ArgoCD

Ansible

Python

Prometheus

Grafana

Loki

OpenTelemetry

OCI

Apache Cassandra

Job description

Medallia is seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to join the Database Services team. You will own production PostgreSQL clusters, drive reliability, performance, and lifecycle management in a Kubernetes-based Medallia Cloud environment.

As a hands-on DBRE, you will lead incident reviews, define service objectives, mentor peers, and build automation to reduce manual toil. Hybrid work with some onsite days is offered, and collaboration with cross-functional teams is essential.