Staff Database Reliability Engineer, Open Internet

Location: Canada

Department: Operations

Location Type: REMOTE

Employment Type: FULL_TIME

• Database architecture & reliability: Design and evolve globally distributed database systems for performance, availability, scalability, and continuity in both bare-metal and cloud environments
• Technical leadership: Lead complex initiatives, establish technical direction, and influence engineering decisions across teams without relying on direct reporting authority
• Platform simplification: Identify opportunities to reduce operational complexity and consolidate the database and infrastructure technology footprint
• Automation: Design and implement automation for provisioning, configuration, deployment, upgrades, testing, maintenance, and database change management use cases
• Operational excellence: Establish durable practices for operating critical data infrastructure, including monitoring, incident response, capacity planning, maintenance, security, IAM, auditing, and traceability
• Performance engineering: Diagnose difficult performance and reliability problems across globally distributed, latency-sensitive infrastructure and drive issues through root cause to durable resolution
• Incident learning: Lead retrospectives and root-cause analysis for significant data-system incidents and convert findings into improvements to tooling, architecture, and operational practices
• Technical roadmap: Evaluate emerging technologies, develop roadmaps for the data platform, and communicate priorities and trade-offs across engineering and business stakeholders
• Mentorship: Raise the technical bar for engineers working with data infrastructure through architecture reviews, technical guidance, documentation, and hands-on collaboration

• Databases & data systems: MySQL, MariaDB, Galera, PostgreSQL, Aerospike, Redis, Kafka, StarRocks, Vertica, Trino, Iceberg
• Infrastructure & orchestration: Kubernetes, bare metal, Terraform, Ansible
• CI/CD & deployment: Helm, GitLab workflows, ArgoCD
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki
• Programming & automation: Python, Go, Bash/Shell, Kotlin, Java
• Adjacent data technologies: Kafka, Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Presto/Trino

• You have 7+ years of experience spanning database reliability engineering, database administration, site reliability engineering focused on data systems, platform engineering, or a comparable infrastructure role
• You have operated large-scale production database systems where reliability, latency, availability, and performance genuinely matter
• You bring deep expertise with relational and distributed data systems and meaningful production experience with several technologies (such as MySQL, MariaDB, Galera, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Aerospike, Redis, StarRocks, or Vertica)
• You have experience deploying and operating stateful systems across Kubernetes and bare-metal infrastructure
• You understand relational data architecture and can make informed decisions around schema design, replication, availability, performance, scale, and continuity
• You have strong automation instincts and experience with infrastructure tooling such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, GitLab CI/CD, ArgoCD, or comparable technologies
• You can automate infrastructure and operational workflows using Python, Go, Bash/Shell, Java, Kotlin, or another appropriate programming language
• You have experience building or operating effective observability systems (using technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or equivalent tooling)
• You understand database change management and have worked with tooling such as Liquibase, Flyway, Alembic, or similar systems
• You can troubleshoot complex failures across distributed infrastructure, reason from symptoms through multiple layers of a system, and identify root causes rather than treating symptoms
• You’re comfortable operating at “staff level” (aka setting direction, navigating ambiguity, mentoring other engineers, balancing immediate operational needs against long-term architecture, and influencing teams outside your immediate domain)
• You can communicate complex technical decisions clearly to both deeply technical colleagues and stakeholders without the same infrastructure background

• You have experience operating databases across globally distributed, ultra-low-latency infrastructure
• You have meaningful experience with streaming and large-scale data technologies such as Kafka, Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Trino/Presto, or Iceberg
• You’ve operated infrastructure spanning both public cloud and privately operated data centres
• You have experience simplifying or consolidating a large database technology footprint without compromising reliability or developer productivity
• You have helped establish security, IAM, auditing, and traceability practices for critical data infrastructure
• You’ve worked in adtech, financial infrastructure, high-frequency systems, large-scale marketplaces, or another environment where extremely high transaction volume and low latency are fundamental engineering constraints