Senior Database Reliability Engineer

We are seeking a technically strong, hands-on Senior Database Reliability Engineer to help design, build, and scale the database platform used across Sezzle’s applications.

This is not a traditional DBA role. This role is for an engineer who can combine deep database knowledge with software engineering, infrastructure engineering, and platform thinking. You will help build the systems, libraries, automation, standards, and guardrails that make database usage across Sezzle reliable, secure, scalable, and easy for developers to adopt correctly.

As a Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you will be responsible for improving how Sezzle applications connect to, migrate, operate, observe, and scale their databases. You will work across application teams, infrastructure, security, and engineering leadership to define patterns that improve database reliability by design — not just by operational response.

You should be comfortable owning problems end-to-end: understanding application behavior, reading code, reviewing database access patterns, building shared tooling, improving connection management, designing migration safety checks, analyzing production performance, and helping developers use databases in safer and more scalable ways.

You should consider yourself a DOer to be a good fit for this role. We are looking for someone who can ship production-quality engineering work, not just advise from the sidelines. With AI tooling and automation, you should be a force multiplier for database reliability, developer productivity, and operational excellence across Sezzle.

Compensation:

For this senior development role, with 6+ years of experience, the compensation range is $5,000 - $9,500 USD per month. This range acknowledges the extensive expertise, leadership capabilities, and significant contributions expected at this level, offering a competitive salary to reflect the value of advanced skills and experience.

What You'll Do:

Design, build, and maintain shared database platform components used by Sezzle applications, such as database connection packages, database client libraries, migration tooling, safety checks, query standards, and developer-facing abstractions.

Establish reliable, scalable patterns for how Sezzle services connect to and interact with relational databases across production, staging, and development environments.

Partner with backend engineering teams to improve database usage in application code, including connection lifecycle, transaction handling, retries, timeouts, pooling, query patterns, and migration workflows.

Build automation and internal tooling that makes database operations safer, more repeatable, and less dependent on manual intervention.

Define and enforce engineering standards for database access, schema design, migrations, indexing, query performance, connection management, and operational readiness.

Architect and improve database infrastructure across AWS RDS/Aurora MySQL, PostgreSQL, RDS Proxy, read replicas, backups, failover, parameter groups, monitoring, and capacity planning.

Lead database reliability initiatives that reduce operational risk, improve performance, and help Sezzle scale safely.

Review application designs and database changes early in the development lifecycle to ensure reliability, scalability, maintainability, and security are built in from the start.

Build guardrails for database migrations, including automated checks, rollback expectations, schema review workflows, migration observability, and production safety controls.

Improve developer self-service for database provisioning, access, schema management, local development, testing, and observability.

Investigate production database issues by combining application telemetry, database metrics, logs, query plans, traces, and cloud infrastructure data.

Identify and fix systemic database problems, not just symptoms — including bad access patterns, unsafe migrations, inefficient queries, connection storms, lock contention, replication lag, and capacity bottlenecks.

Create and maintain high-signal dashboards, alerts, SLOs, SLIs, runbooks, and operational readiness checks for database-backed services.

Drive improvements in database backup validation, restore testing, disaster recovery, failover readiness, and business continuity.

Work with security and compliance teams to improve database access controls, auditability, encryption, secrets management, least privilege, and PCI/SOC 2 aligned controls.

Mentor engineers on database design, query performance, safe migrations, operational readiness, and production debugging.

Use automation and AI tooling where appropriate to improve migration review, query analysis, incident investigation, documentation, and developer productivity.