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Sr. Engineer, Database Reliability

Zapier· Engineering
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Remote$174.2k - $261.2kFull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Senior DBRE on Zapier's State team responsible for defining and operating the data infrastructure (MySQL/PostgreSQL, Redis/ElastiCache) with a focus on automation, observability, performance, reliability, and disaster recovery. Acts as technical center of gravity for database and cache work, mentors engineers, and helps grow the DBRE practice.

Responsibilities

  • Own the reliability of our caching layer: capacity planning, failover behavior, upgrade strategy, and healthy usage patterns for caches hosted in Redis Enterprise and AWS ElastiCache.
  • Participate in our on-call rotation and serve as the point of escalation for data-layer issues during production incidents.
  • Support internal customers day to day, from troubleshooting a slow query to advising on storage usage, and turn recurring questions into documentation and tooling.
  • Manage our database and cache infrastructure as code, evolving our Terraform modules and provisioning workflows so changes are repeatable, reviewable, and safe.
  • Build database and cache templated standards within our internal platform's golden path that take developers from zero to a scalable, performant, and secure setup, so they can focus on building great services quickly and easily.
  • Build and maintain observability for the data layer: dashboards, alerts, and SLOs that give both our team and our internal customers a clear picture of database and cache health.
  • Identify and implement strategies to improve performance and resilience across our MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis fleets.
  • Work with development teams to make architectural decisions about new services and technologies, including which engine fits the workload and where caching belongs.
  • Consult with product teams on schema design, query patterns, and capacity planning so they succeed with the data layer.
  • Lead design review for data-layer work and mentor engineers across the team on database and cache practice.
  • Raise the overall bar for how we operate the data layer, turning your experience into docs, patterns, and runbooks the team can rely on.

Qualifications

  • You're an experienced database technologist. You have at least 7 years in systems administration, systems engineering, or software development, with at least 4 years running production relational databases.
  • Deep expertise in MySQL or PostgreSQL and working knowledge of the other, including each engine's ecosystem of extensions and tools.
  • Understanding caching (such as Redis) as part of the data layer, how to design and operate it at scale, and the tradeoffs between caching and the database underneath.
  • You've designed and maintained highly available, cloud-based database systems in AWS or another cloud platform, and you manage that infrastructure with Terraform or similar IaC tooling.
  • Comfortable operating stateful services alongside Kubernetes or other distributed systems, and you understand the tradeoffs of running data workloads in and around orchestrated environments.
  • You've implemented metrics, logging, and alerting for data systems using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch, and you treat query performance data, replication lag, and cache hit rates as first-class signals.
  • Product-minded collaboration with the ability to discuss workload, provide options with tradeoffs, and support on-call incident response.
  • Experience mentoring and leading, with a tendency to codify learnings into docs, patterns, and runbooks.
  • Experience shipping code to solve systems problems and willingness to touch application code to fix issues or build data-management tooling.
  • Comfort using AI tools to improve automation, analysis, and incident response, with good judgment on reliability.

Skills

Required:Relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL)Caching systems (Redis/ElastiCache)Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)Observability (Datadog/Prometheus/CloudWatch)On-call incident responseSystem design / architecture

Benefits

  • Compensation in local currencies with equity and bonus opportunities (USD, CAD, GBP, EUR equivalents).
  • Transparent, competitive pay principles aligned with impact, equity, and consistency.
  • Total rewards information available via Zapier resources.
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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