Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Postgres
UNITED STATES
October 20, 2026
Full Time
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Job Description

Company: Scribe
Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) or Remote (PST)
Workplace Type: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $150K – $240K

About the Role

Scribe is looking for a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to own the reliability, performance, and scalability of Scribe’s data tier. As the engineering organization doubles in size, you will set the bar for how engineers across the company interact with databases, establish critical guardrails, and build automation to scale operations. This is a senior individual contributor role with high impact and real ownership.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Data Tier Architecture: Design schemas and access patterns that scale, tune Aurora for latency and throughput, and reinforce standards for database interaction.
  • ORM & Migration Safety: Review migrations for safety at scale—managing locks, backfills, concurrent index builds, and NOT VALID constraints—while catching N+1 query patterns.
  • Infrastructure Initiatives: Drive capacity planning, zero-downtime schema migrations, multi-AZ resilience, backups, point-in-time recovery (PITR), and failover testing.
  • CDC Pipeline Operations: Operate and extend the change data capture pipeline (Aurora to DMS to S3 Parquet to Snowflake), ensuring schema evolution and reliable handoffs.
  • Tooling & Guardrails: Build automated checks, slow query pipelines fed from pganalyze, and self-service dashboards for engineering teams.
  • Adjacent Stack Support: Manage and evolve OpenSearch, Redis, and message brokers (SQS and RabbitMQ).

Requirements & Qualifications

  • 5+ years of strong production experience with PostgreSQL (EXPLAIN ANALYZE, MVCC, bloat, lock contention, vacuum/autovacuum).
  • Experience with Aurora Serverless V2 (storage model, reader/writer split, ACU scaling).
  • ORM fluency (Django, SQLAlchemy, ActiveRecord, or similar) with the ability to predict generated SQL and spot performance anti-patterns.
  • Practical understanding of single-region multi-AZ design and high availability principles.
  • Production CDC experience, ideally with AWS DMS, logical replication, and Parquet-based data lakes.
  • Hands-on expertise with monitoring tools such as pganalyze, Datadog DBM, or CloudWatch.
  • Experience using AI coding and review tools (Claude Code, Cursor, AGENTS.md) in a team setting.
  • Experience with at least one message broker (SQS, RabbitMQ, Kafka).
  • Solid automation and infrastructure-as-code background using Python, Go, and Terraform.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

  • Event sourcing on Postgres or experience with alternative CDC tooling (Debezium, Fivetran, Airbyte).
  • Experience with pgbouncer or RDS Proxy at scale.
  • Deep usage of Honeycomb (SLOs, BubbleUp, Triggers).
  • Experience scaling data infrastructure through rapid headcount growth and compliance frameworks (SOC 2, GDPR).

Benefits & Perks (if applicable)

  • Healthcare Coverage: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision plans, including two $0/month medical plan options.
  • Equity: Ownership stake in the company.
  • Retirement & Financial: 401(k) plan through Vestwell and commuter benefits.
  • Flex Benefit: $500/year for home office equipment, learning, and fitness.
  • Paid Time Off: Flexible PTO and company holidays, alongside paid parental leave.
  • Wellness Support: Free Talkspace membership, One Medical access, and Kindbody discounts.

Scribe is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.

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