Senior SRE: Database Reliability (Vitess & Cassandra)

Backblaze External Website

United States

Remote

USD 125,000 - 150,000

Full time

6 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

MacBook Pro for work

Stipend for workstation setup

Flexible vacation policy

Maternity & paternity leave

RSU grants for full-time employees

ESPP program

401K

Healthcare coverage

Parental leave

Job summary

Backblaze is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA) to ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of production databases (Vitess/MySQL and Cassandra). You will design architecture, craft runbooks, and own incident response with a focus on reliability and operational excellence.

Ideal candidates have 6–8 years in SRE/DBA roles, strong SQL, Linux, and experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD tooling.

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 with Vitess in a production environment strongly preferred.
Experience administering and supporting NoSQL databases such as Cassandra.
Strong SQL skills, including query performance analysis, indexing, schema design, and troubleshooting.
Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
Experience with security-focused operations including patching, system hardening, access controls, and vulnerability remediation.
Strong understanding of service reliability concepts including monitoring, alerting, incident response, root cause analysis, SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
Experience working with containers and orchestration platforms including Kubernetes and Docker.
Proficiency with infrastructure and configuration management technologies including Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, and HashiCorp products such as Vault and Nomad.
Proficiency in at least one scripting language such as Python, Bash, or Go.
Experience establishing operational procedures, runbooks, documentation, and escalation processes.
Experience mentoring, training, or helping onboard engineers into complex technical environments.
Experience in SaaS, cloud services, service provider, or large-scale distributed systems environments preferred.
Experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar cloud platforms preferred.
Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLA/SLO management preferred.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Responsibilities

Design, deploy, and own highly available database architecture for Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra.
Establish and document operational procedures, runbooks, and escalation guidance for Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers.
Own database backup, recovery, replication, and disaster recovery strategies.
Perform and validate disaster recovery testing and database recovery procedures.
Drive database security, access control, patching, hardening, and compliance practices.
Partner with the DBA and Data Infrastructure teams on resharding, capacity planning, replication, and architecture decisions for sharded MySQL environments.
Monitor service health using SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, monitoring, logging, and alerting platforms.
Develop automation for common operational and database administration tasks to reduce manual intervention and operational toil.
Lead Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs) for functionality handed off from engineering partner teams.
Respond to and resolve production database, infrastructure, and service incidents.