Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Database & Vitess

Openkrill; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Backblaze is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA) to ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of production databases, primarily Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra. You will own the end-to-end operations of database services and participate in on-call, incident response, and continuous improvement.

The role requires designing database architectures, developing runbooks for Level 1 and 2 engineers, and collaborating with DBA/Data Infrastructure teams on sharded MySQL

Qualifications

• 6–8 years of experience in site reliability engineering, systems engineering, infrastructure operations, database engineering, or similar roles, with meaningful experience supporting production database systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with MySQL and distributed or sharded database systems.
• Experience administering NoSQL databases such as Cassandra.
• Strong Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Experience with monitoring, alerting, incident response, SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Experience with containers and orchestration platforms including Kubernetes and Docker.
• Experience with Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, and HashiCorp products.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language such as Python, Bash, or Go.
• Experience establishing operational procedures, runbooks, documentation, and escalation processes.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and own highly available database architectures for Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra.
• Document operational procedures, runbooks, and escalation guidance for Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers.
• Optimize database performance through indexing, schema design, and capacity planning.
• Own backup, recovery, replication, and disaster recovery strategies; perform DR testing.
• Drive database security, patching, hardening, and access controls.
• Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
• Develop automation for common operational tasks to reduce toil.
• Collaborate with DBA and Data Infrastructure teams on sharding, replication, and architecture decisions.

Skills

MySQL

Vitess

Cassandra

Kubernetes

Linux

SRE

Automation

Python

Incident response

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Jenkins

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK

kubectl

Job description

Backblaze is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA) to ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of production databases, primarily Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra. You will own the end-to-end operations of database services and participate in on-call, incident response, and continuous improvement.

The role requires designing database architectures, developing runbooks for Level 1 and 2 engineers, and collaborating with DBA/Data Infrastructure teams on sharded MySQL