Principal Database Reliability Engineer

Overview

Principal Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) serving as the highest individual-contributor technical authority for enterprise data-platform reliability and architecture, anchored in OpenSearch/Elasticsearch and distributed-systems reliability.

What you'll do

• Define enterprise architecture principles and target-state direction anchored in OpenSearch and distributed-systems reliability.
• Guide cross-domain decisions spanning search, streaming, caching, and relational services without displacing domain specialists.
• Resolve architecture conflicts involving scalability, resilience, operability, security, cost, data movement, and lifecycle constraints.
• Establish enterprise production-readiness, SLI/SLO, backup, recovery, DR, capacity, lifecycle, and incident-learning principles.
• Lead the technical response and systemic review for the most consequential multi-platform failures.
• Translate recurring incidents and platform risks into architecture safeguards and prioritized investment roadmaps.
• Define the strategy for shared Python automation platforms, operational APIs/CLIs, CI/CD guardrails, validation frameworks, safe remediation, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Promote self-service and platform-as-a-product practices that reduce toil while preserving change safety and accountability.
• Lead workload-relevant evaluation of emerging technologies, including operability, failure behavior, migration risk, performance, and total cost.
• Partner with senior engineering and executive leadership on multi-year technical direction, platform investments, and modernization decisions.
• Mentor Staff and Lead engineers, cultivate technical leadership, and improve architecture-review and decision-making quality.

What you'll need

• 12+ years of relevant database, DBRE, SRE, platform, or distributed-systems engineering experience with Principal, Staff, Lead, or comparable technical leadership responsibility.
• Expert-level OpenSearch and/or Elasticsearch architecture and production operations experience.
• Strong distributed-systems reasoning and meaningful production experience in at least two of Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, or Oracle.
• Strong software-engineering and automation capability, preferably Python-based platform tooling and APIs.
• Proven ability to define multi-year technical direction, resolve cross-domain architecture problems, and influence senior engineering and executive stakeholders.
• Deep understanding of reliability, capacity, observability, lifecycle management, DR, security, and cost tradeoffs.
• Excellent written communication, technical judgment, mentorship, and organizational influence.

Nice to have

• Breadth across both distributed and relational database technologies.
• Kubernetes stateful platforms, cloud-managed data services, hybrid architectures, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience with ClickHouse, Pinot, vector databases, NewSQL, stream processing, or similar emerging technologies.
• Experience influencing vendors or open-source communities and guiding major modernization programs.

Details

• Location: Pune.
• Works during U.S. Eastern Time (ET) business hours.
• Participates in on-call support as required.
• Not a people-management role unless separately assigned.