Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Scribe

Senior Database Reliability Engineer managing Scribe's data tier reliability and scalability. Driving improvements across databases and CDC pipelines with a focus on observability and resilience.

Posted 6/9/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $145,000 - $230,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Amazon RedshiftAWSBigQueryDjangoGoKafkaPostgresPythonRabbitMQRedisSQLTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own database reliability across Aurora, OpenSearch, Redis, and our CDC pipeline — including schema design reviews, migration safety (locks, backfills, concurrent index builds, NOT VALID constraints), and incident response for the data tier
Make the Django ORM a strength at scale: catch N+1 patterns in review, extend QuerySet conventions and physical schema standards, and build the CI checks and AGENTS.md scaffolding that encode those standards so they scale beyond any single reviewer
Operate and evolve the CDC pipeline from Aurora through DMS to S3 Parquet to Snowflake – including replication slot hygiene, schema evolution safety, and automated checks that catch migrations likely to break downstream consumers before they ship
Build and improve observability across pganalyze, CloudWatch, and Honeycomb, with Django-side instrumentation that ties slow ORM queries back to specific users, flags, and deploys
Drive multi-AZ resilience within our single-region architecture — Aurora writer/reader placement, failover behavior, RTO/RPO, ElastiCache and OpenSearch AZ topology, RabbitMQ survivability
Build self-service tooling and dashboards that give product and platform teams visibility into their own query footprint, reducing the review burden as the engineering org grows
Contribute to onboarding and knowledge-sharing as a large incoming class of engineers joins — write docs, run internal sessions on "what your ORM query is really doing," and feed that knowledge back into AI review tooling

Requirements

What you’ll need

Has deep PostgreSQL expertise in practice: reads EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) fluently, understands MVCC, bloat, lock contention, and vacuum behavior, and can tune Aurora Serverless V2 for latency and throughput
Has worked with an ORM (Django, SQLAlchemy, ActiveRecord, or similar) at production scale – can predict the SQL a query generates, spot N+1 issues on sight, and knows when joins beat batched IN queries and when they don't
Has run CDC pipelines in production, ideally with AWS DMS — comfortable with logical replication, slot hygiene, schema evolution, and Parquet-based data lakes feeding Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift
Has hands-on experience with pganalyze (or Datadog DBM / pg_stat_statements pipelines), CloudWatch, and Honeycomb (or another high-cardinality tracing tool); comfortable with OpenTelemetry
Has worked with OpenSearch, Redis, and at least one production message broker (SQS, RabbitMQ, or Kafka) at scale
Writes real automation — Python, Go, or similar — and has used Terraform or comparable IaC to manage infrastructure
Has used AI coding and review tools in a team setting: written or maintained AGENTS.md files, configured review agents, iterated on prompts

Benefits

Comp & perks

Health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents
Flexible paid time off and company holidays
401(k)
Paid parental leave
Daily catered lunch (SF office)
Commuter benefits
Home office stipend

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Hard Skills & Tools

PostgreSQLDjango ORMCDC pipelinesAWS DMSParquetpganalyzeCloudWatchOpenTelemetryPythonTerraform

Soft Skills

knowledge-sharingdocumentationonboardingcommunication