Database Reliability Engineer / DBRE

Location: Montreal, Canada

Department: Data Engineering

Pour la version française de cette description de poste, veuillez consulter le lien suivant / For the French version of this job description, please refer to the following link:

• Ingénieur de la fiabilité des bases de données

About AppDirect

Become a digital, global citizen and enable the new generation of digital entrepreneurs around the world. AppDirect offers a subscription commerce platform to sell any product, through any channel, on any device as a service. We power millions of subscriptions worldwide for organizations. We do this by our values-driven culture, one that enables you to Be Seen, Be Yourself, and Do Your Best Work.

About the Data Platform Team

Our mission is to deliver reliable, secure, and scalable data infrastructure as a service across AppDirect. We treat data infrastructure as a product—databases, search, cache, and lakehouse capabilities that engineering teams can depend on to build and ship with confidence.

The Data Platform team supports 80+ data stores across the organization and operates against four quality pillars: resiliency and capacity, security, operational excellence, and performance and scalability. We enable self-serve access and automation, lead large-scale database migrations driven by company growth and acquisitions, and partner closely with Cloud Platform, DevOps, and product engineering so teams get fit-for-purpose data stores that are secure by design.

As data infrastructure enters its AI-native era, we are investing in AI-assisted operations, self-service tooling, and lakehouse modernization—reducing toil, improving time-to-insight, and helping newly acquired teams onboard onto our data platform quickly and safely.

About You

We are looking for a Database Reliability Engineer to join our Data Platform team. You are a highly technical professional with an entrepreneurial spirit and a data-as-a-service mindset. You thrive on efficiency, automation (including AI-driven approaches), and continuous learning—and you want your work to make a meaningful impact.

This is a unique opportunity to build at the intersection of highly scalable, fault-tolerant data services and modern cloud infrastructure. You will take on complex technical challenges across database reliability, migrations, and platform automation, and play a key role in evolving our cloud-native data environment. You enjoy guiding engineers toward the right data store for the job, building self-healing systems, and leaving behind documentation and patterns that help others move faster.

What you'll do and how you'll have an impact

• Lead large-scale database migration projects driven by company acquisitions, client onboarding, and platform growth—planning for minimal downtime, strong rollback strategies, and zero data loss.
• Design and execute deployment strategies for blue/green rollouts, data archiving, and partitioning across relational, key-value, and document data stores.
• Use AI-powered automation to strengthen our data platform across our quality pillars: operational excellence, security and compliance, performance and scalability, and resiliency and capacity planning.
• Apply AI-assisted development tools and spec-driven workflows to design, automate, and ship database platform changes faster—Terraform modules, runbooks, diagnostics, and operational tooling—with clear acceptance criteria and high code quality.
• Partner with the Data Insights team on lakehouse enablement (e.g., Databricks, Apache Iceberg, Unity Catalog)—bridging transactional data stores and analytics infrastructure through reliable access patterns, security/governance alignment, and safe onboarding of workloads onto the lakehouse.
• Guide engineers in delivering fit-for-purpose database solutions across relational (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server), key-value (Redis), document (MongoDB), and search (Elasticsearch).
• Maintain a strong culture of documentation by developing and sharing high-quality knowledge resources for engineers and AI-assisted workflows.
• Participate in incident response and on-call rotation to maintain data infrastructure health.

What we're looking for

• Strong understanding of AI-assisted development workflows, with proven hands-on experience using tools such as Cursor, Claude, to improve efficiency, automation, and code quality.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience running and operating MySQL and/or PostgreSQL in large-scale production environments, with deep knowledge of database internals
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with NoSQL—one of MongoDB, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
• 2+ years of experience with AWS cloud services.
• Strong expertise in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), with a primary focus on Terraform.
• Strong preferred exposure to lakehouse and analytics infrastructure (e.g., Databricks, Apache Iceberg, Unity Catalog) with an interest in collaborating with Data Insights on lakehouse enablement.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Strong communication skills for explaining complex technical topics to peers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working in a distributed team.

At AppDirect, we believe that innovation thrives in an environment that houses diversity of excellence, experience and thought. We respect each AppDirector as their own fingerprint; unique with no one alike. We foster an environment of inclusion without regard to race, religion, age, sexual orientation, or gender identity enabling AppDirectors to embrace their uniqueness to do their best work. As such, we strongly encourage applications from Indigenous peoples, racialized people, people with disabilities, people from gender and sexually diverse communities, and/or people with intersectional identities.

At AppDirect we take privacy very seriously. For more information about our use and handling of personal data from job applicants, please read our Candidate Privacy Policy. For more information of our general privacy practices, please see AppDirect Privacy Notice: https://www.appdirect.com/about/privacy-notice

At AppDirect, AI tools may assist our recruitment team with administrative automations — always under human oversight. AI tools do not make hiring decisions or solely automated decisions about your candidacy – all decisions are made by our people. By submitting your application, you acknowledge that your information may be processed in this way. You may request access or deletion at any time by contacting privacy@appdirect.com.