Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Postgres
UNITED STATES
September 25, 2026
Full Time
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Job Description

Company: Scribe
Location: United States (San Francisco, CA or Remote permanently in PST)
Workplace Type: Remote (or Hybrid in SF)
Employment Type: Permanent (Full-time)
Pay / Compensation: $145K/yr – $230K/yr

About the Role

More than 94% of the Fortune 500 use Scribe to own their specialized intelligence: the unique way their teams work, decide, and get things done. Scribe’s platform automatically captures how work happens and turns it into a living asset that helps people and AI agents do their best work. Since founding in 2019, Scribe has grown to 7 million users across 600,000 businesses, earned recognition as a LinkedIn Top Startup, reached a valuation over $1 billion, and secured backing from leading investors.

As Scribe’s engineering organization doubles, we are hiring a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to own the reliability, performance, and scalability of our data tier. This is a senior IC role with true ownership: setting standards, guardrails, and automation for how engineers across the company interact with databases.

Our core architecture runs Django on PostgreSQL (Aurora Serverless V2), OpenSearch, Redis (ElastiCache), SQS, and RabbitMQ, alongside a CDC pipeline moving data from Aurora to DMS to S3 Parquet to Snowflake. Because engineers ship changes through an ORM rather than raw SQL, migration safety, query review, and index design represent high-stakes engineering work.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Own database reliability across Aurora, OpenSearch, Redis, and our CDC pipeline, including schema design reviews, incident response, and migration safety (locks, backfills, concurrent index builds, NOT VALID constraints)
  • Make the Django ORM a strength at scale by catching N+1 patterns in review, extending QuerySet conventions, establishing physical schema standards, and building CI checks and AGENTS.md scaffolding to automate these standards
  • Operate and evolve the CDC pipeline from Aurora through AWS DMS to S3 Parquet to Snowflake, maintaining replication slot hygiene, schema evolution safety, and automated checks to prevent breaking downstream consumers
  • Build and improve observability across pganalyze, CloudWatch, and Honeycomb, utilizing Django-side instrumentation to trace slow ORM queries back to specific users, feature flags, and deployments
  • Drive multi-AZ resilience within a single-region architecture, including Aurora writer/reader placement, failover behavior, RTO/RPO targets, ElastiCache/OpenSearch AZ topology, and RabbitMQ survivability
  • Build self-service tooling and dashboards that give product and platform teams visibility into their own query footprints, reducing review bottlenecks
  • Contribute to onboarding and knowledge-sharing for incoming engineers by writing documentation, running internal sessions on ORM internals, and feeding best practices back into AI review tooling

Requirements & Qualifications

  • Deep, practical PostgreSQL expertise: ability to fluently read EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS), deep understanding of MVCC, table bloat, lock contention, autovacuum behavior, and Aurora Serverless V2 latency/throughput tuning
  • Production-scale experience with ORMs (Django, SQLAlchemy, ActiveRecord, or similar), including predicting generated SQL, identifying N+1 queries on sight, and evaluating execution tradeoffs between joins and batched IN queries
  • Proven experience running production CDC pipelines (ideally with AWS DMS), including logical replication, slot hygiene, schema evolution, and feeding Parquet-based data lakes to Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift
  • Hands-on experience with pganalyze (or Datadog DBM / pg_stat_statements pipelines), CloudWatch, Honeycomb (or comparable high-cardinality tracing), and OpenTelemetry
  • Experience working at scale with OpenSearch, Redis, and at least one production message broker (SQS, RabbitMQ, or Kafka)
  • Strong automation skills in Python, Go, or a similar language, combined with Terraform or equivalent Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools
  • Experience leveraging AI coding and review tools in a collaborative environment, including writing/maintaining AGENTS.md files, configuring review agents, and refining prompts

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

  • Event sourcing on PostgreSQL, or experience with alternative CDC tooling (Debezium, Fivetran, Airbyte)
  • Experience running pgbouncer or RDS Proxy at scale with Django connection pooling
  • Advanced Honeycomb usage (SLOs, BubbleUp, Triggers, derived columns)
  • Producer-side Snowflake experience (staging, Snowpipe, external tables on Parquet)
  • Experience scaling database infrastructure through rapid engineering headcount growth
  • Experience with SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, or related security and compliance frameworks

Benefits & Perks

  • Competitive salary ($145K – $230K) plus equity packages for all full-time employees
  • Health, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents
  • Flexible paid time off and company holidays
  • 401(k) plan
  • Paid parental leave
  • Daily catered lunch (for San Francisco office team members)
  • Commuter benefits
  • Home office stipend

Location Details

San Francisco (hybrid, 3 days per week in-office) or Remote based permanently in PST (Pacific Standard Time).

Equal Opportunity Employer

At Scribe, we celebrate our differences and are committed to creating a workplace where all employees feel supported and empowered to do their best work. Scribe is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. Final offers depend on experience and scope.

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