Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Overview

Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) on the Data Platform team, focused on hands-on reliability and operational ownership of assigned OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, Kafka, and Redis services, with Python automation and disciplined production execution. Senior individual contributor role.

What you'll do

• Operate, scale, and improve assigned OpenSearch/Elasticsearch clusters and node topologies.
• Troubleshoot shard allocation, indexing throughput, slow search and aggregation workloads, cluster state, JVM heap/GC, disk, memory, and recovery issues.
• Implement and maintain index templates, shard strategies, ISM/ILM policies, rollover, retention, snapshot, restore, and rolling-upgrade procedures.
• Operate Kafka topics, partitions, replication, retention, consumer groups, and broker health; diagnose lag, rebalance storms, and capacity bottlenecks.
• Operate Redis Cluster and Sentinel environments; address memory fragmentation, eviction behavior, persistence, replication lag, connection limits, and failover issues.
• Develop clean, modular Python automation for health checks, maintenance, validation, reporting, and safe remediation.
• Use Terraform, Ansible, GitOps workflows, or Kubernetes operators where applicable to make platform operations repeatable.
• Instrument actionable metrics and alerts using Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or comparable platforms.
• Participate in on-call, stabilize incidents, document root cause, and complete preventive actions.
• Contribute to capacity planning, production-readiness reviews, runbooks, and design reviews.

What you'll need

• 5+ years of relevant DBRE, SRE, database, or distributed-systems operations experience in production environments.
• Strong hands-on OpenSearch and/or Elasticsearch experience, including shards, indexing, search, lifecycle management, JVM behavior, and snapshot/restore.
• Production experience with at least one of Kafka or Redis.
• Strong Linux and systems troubleshooting skills across CPU, memory, storage I/O, networking, and process behavior.
• Ability to write maintainable Python automation beyond simple one-off shell scripts.
• Experience with monitoring, incident response, controlled production changes, upgrades, and operational documentation.
• Clear communication, sound judgment, and willingness to escalate risk early.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with both Kafka and Redis.
• Terraform, Ansible, GitOps, Kubernetes, ECK/OpenSearch, Strimzi, or Redis operators.
• Cloud-managed data services in AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Familiarity with ClickHouse, Pinot, vector databases, Flink, Spark Streaming, or Kafka Connect.

Details

• Work during U.S. Eastern Time (ET) business hours.
• On-call participation as required.