Senior Database Reliability Engineer (PostgreSQL)

Job Description

Company: Medallia
Location: McLean, VA
Workplace Type: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $90,000 – $120,000

About the Role

Medallia is seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) to join the Database Services team, owning the production database systems that power a highly reliable global SaaS platform. In this role, you will combine deep PostgreSQL expertise with an automation mindset to operate clusters, diagnose incidents, tune performance, execute upgrades, and build automated capabilities for the broader engineering organization. Candidates based in the Tysons Corner vicinity will be prioritized as this role is hybrid, 3 days per week onsite.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

• Availability & Performance: Own the availability and performance of production PostgreSQL clusters measured against defined service level objectives.
• Database Lifecycle: Manage the complete database lifecycle including provisioning, configuration, maintenance, major-version upgrades, scaling, and decommissioning.
• HA & Disaster Recovery: Own backup, point-in-time recovery, replication, and high availability, conducting regular restore tests and failover drills against established RPO and RTO targets.
• Automation & Tooling: Build production-quality automation, tooling, and self-service capabilities to replace recurring manual workflows across the database lifecycle.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product-engineering teams to review schema migrations and query patterns, guiding them on PostgreSQL best practices.
• Troubleshooting & Incident Response: Troubleshoot complex issues spanning the database, OS, network, and application layers, leading incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Mentorship & Documentation: Mentor other DBREs, review technical work, and maintain runbooks and documentation that facilitate progressive automation.

Requirements & Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience running PostgreSQL in large-scale production or SaaS environments.
• Demonstrated technical knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, including MVCC, vacuum, WAL, locking, concurrency, and query planning.
• Proven production experience managing core operations including capacity planning, backup/restore validation, replication, high availability, upgrades, and performance tuning.
• Experience reviewing schema migrations and query changes for production impact.
• Strong background in incident response and root-cause analysis for customer-facing production systems.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional engineering teams.
• Availability to participate in on-call rotations and scheduled maintenance windows.
• Fluency in English, both spoken and written.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

• Experience operating multi-terabyte databases or large fleets of database clusters.
• Familiarity with Patroni or comparable PostgreSQL HA stacks, and connection poolers like PgBouncer.
• Experience performing zero- or near-zero-downtime operations, schema partitioning, and major-version upgrades via logical replication or pg_upgrade.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes, Linux OS fundamentals, CI/CD tools (Jenkins, ArgoCD), and Infrastructure-as-Code (Ansible).
• Proficiency in Python for building production automation and tooling.
• Familiarity with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and Apache Cassandra.

Benefits & Perks (if applicable)

• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits including medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Short-term and long-term disability, life, and AD&D insurance.
• Paid parental leave, statutory leaves, and paid holidays.

Medallia is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected status.