Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer, Database

Postgres, MySQL
UNITED STATES
October 20, 2026
Full Time
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Job Description

Company: DraftKings Inc.
Location: Remote – US
Workplace Type: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $168,000.00 – $210,000.00 USD (plus bonus, equity, and benefits)

About the Role

At DraftKings, AI is becoming an integral part of both our present and future, powering how work gets done today, guiding smarter decisions, and sparking bold ideas. As a Senior Lead Reliability Engineer, Database, you’ll own the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of the database infrastructure powering one of the most demanding real-time platforms in sports betting and gaming. In this role, you’ll combine deep database expertise with software engineering and infrastructure automation to build resilient, self-healing systems, improve platform performance, and drive reliability across cloud and on-premises database environments.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Technical Roadmap Ownership: Drive the technical roadmap for database reliability across PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, ScyllaDB, Aerospike, and managed cloud services, while shaping architecture for high availability, replication, partitioning, storage, and connection management.
  • Automation & Platform Tooling: Design and build automation-first database platforms by developing Kubernetes operators, infrastructure as code, GitOps workflows, and production-quality tooling in Go or Python to automate provisioning, failover, backups, schema migrations, and lifecycle management.
  • Operational Excellence: Lead operational excellence by defining service level objectives, monitoring database health, capacity, and performance, eliminating recurring reliability issues, validating backup and recovery processes, and leading critical production incidents through resolution.
  • Performance & Cost Optimization: Optimize database performance and cost across cloud and on-premises environments by driving capacity planning, resource efficiency, storage optimization, workload consolidation, and performance tuning for large-scale systems.
  • Cross-Functional Engineering Partnership: Partner closely with application engineering teams to establish safe database practices, including schema reviews, migration strategies, query optimization, connection management, and zero-downtime deployment processes.
  • AI Integration: Leverage AI to improve engineering productivity and database operations through intelligent observability, anomaly detection, root cause analysis, documentation, and predictive insights.
  • Mentorship & Leadership: Mentor engineers across the organization by sharing best practices, leading design and code reviews, influencing technical direction, and raising the overall maturity of database reliability engineering.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • At least 6 years of experience in Database Reliability Engineering, Database Platform Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering with a strong database focus, including technical leadership experience delivering complex database infrastructure projects at scale.
  • Deep expertise in at least one major relational database, preferably PostgreSQL, along with operational experience supporting technologies such as MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, ScyllaDB, Aerospike, Aurora, Cloud SQL, and other managed cloud database services.
  • Strong experience building and operating stateful workloads on Kubernetes using technologies such as StatefulSets, Persistent Volumes, database operators, Terraform, Pulumi, FluxCD, ArgoCD, GKE, and EKS.
  • Hands-on software development experience using Go or Python to create automation, platform tooling, Kubernetes controllers, APIs, and infrastructure that reduces manual effort.
  • A data-driven, automation-first mindset with proven experience improving reliability through observability, monitoring, service level objectives, capacity planning, and performance optimization.
  • Practical experience using AI tools (such as Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, MCP) to improve design, coding, documentation, and troubleshooting workflows.
  • Excellent leadership and communication skills with a track record of mentoring engineers, influencing architectural decisions, and producing clear technical documentation.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

  • Experience in regulated gaming environments or similarly high-throughput, low-latency real-time transactional platforms.

Benefits & Perks (if applicable)

  • Base salary range of $168,000.00 – $210,000.00 USD
  • Performance bonuses, equity, and comprehensive benefits package

As a regulated gaming company, you may be required to obtain a gaming license issued by the appropriate state agency as a condition of employment.

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