SRE Database Engineer (Vitess/Cassandra)

Backblaze; United States; Remote; USD 125,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare for family, includingDental

401K

RSU grants

Flexible vacation policy

Maternity & paternity leave

MacBook Pro for work stipend

Culture supporting work-life balance

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 help establish the Database Engineering function, design architecture, runbooks, and on-call support.

The role requires strong Linux, automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes, observability, and incident response expertise with a proactive reliability mindset.

Qualifications

• 6–8 years in site reliability engineering or related roles with production DB experience.
• Deep hands-on with MySQL and distributed/sharded DB systems (Vitess preferred).
• Experience with Cassandra and NoSQL DB administration.
• Strong Linux administration and scripting (Python, Bash, Go).
• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, and CI/CD tools.
• Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices, SLA/SLO management, and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and own Vitess and Cassandra DB architectures for high availability.
• Create runbooks, escalation guidance, and training materials for Level 1/2 SRE DB engineers.
• Develop automation to reduce manual toil and improve reliability.
• Monitor service health with SLIs/SLOs, incident response, and post-incident reviews.
• Lead PRRs for production readiness of database-backed services.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, and DBA/Data Infrastructure teams on reliability initiatives.
• Mentor and onboard engineers into complex tech environments.

Skills

MySQL

Vitess

Cassandra

Kubernetes

Linux

SRE/Incidents

Terraform

Python/Bash/Go

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering or related field

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Jenkins

HashiCorp Vault/Nomad

Prometheus/Grafana

FireHydrant

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 help establish the Database Engineering function, design architecture, runbooks, and on-call support.

The role requires strong Linux, automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes, observability, and incident response expertise with a proactive reliability mindset.