Sr. Engineer, Database Reliability at Zapier · LumiJobs
senior
$174k–$261k
H1B: no
Zapier The Sr. Engineer, Database Reliability at Zapier leads database and cache reliability efforts for the State team, managing MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and ElastiCache. This senior role sets technical direction and grows the DBRE practice.
Responsibilities
Set direction on data infrastructure and solve operational problems
Operate and maintain production relational databases
Design and maintain highly available cloud-based database systems
Manage infrastructure with Terraform or similar IaC tooling
Operate stateful services alongside Kubernetes or other distributed systems
Grow the DBRE practice on the team
Qualification
You build and use observabilityYou partner with product teamsYou ship code to solve systems problemsYou work AI-firstThings You'll DoKeep the lights onSupport internal customers day to day
Required
You're an experienced database technologist. You have at least 7 years in systems administration, systems engineering, or software development, with at least 4 years running production relational databases. You have deep expertise in MySQL or PostgreSQL and working knowledge of the other, including each engine's ecosystem of extensions and tools. You understand caching (such as Redis) as part of the data layer, how to design and operate it at scale, and the tradeoffs between caching and the database underneath.
You know the cloud and treat infrastructure as code. You've designed and maintained highly available, cloud-based database systems in AWS or another cloud platform, and you manage that infrastructure with Terraform or similar IaC tooling rather than by hand. You're comfortable operating stateful services alongside Kubernetes or other distributed systems, and you understand the tradeoffs of running data workloads in and around orchestrated environments.
You build and use observability. You've implemented metrics, logging, and alerting for data systems using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch, and you know the difference between a dashboard that looks good and one that catches problems before customers do. You treat query performance data, replication lag, and cache hit rates as first-class signals.
You partner with product teams. Product teams are your customers. When a team comes to you with a design or a problem, you ask about their workload before prescribing a solution, give them options with tradeoffs rather than edicts, and leave them more capable than you found them. You handle support requests with the same care as incident response, you participate in an on-call rotation for production data systems, and you'd rather teach a team to fish than field the same question twice. You document things well so your knowledge can be consumed asynchronously.
You raise the bar for the team around you. You're the most experienced DBRE on this team, and you treat that as a responsibility. You review peers' designs and give feedback that makes the design better and the engineer sharper. You pair on hard problems when it helps someone else grow. You turn things you've learned the hard way into docs, patterns, and runbooks so the next person doesn't have to learn them the hard way too. You care about the team being more capable a year from now than it is today.
You ship code to solve systems problems. You automate repetitive work and build tools that make the team more effective. You're comfortable digging into application code to fix a bug or launching a backend service to close a gap in our data management strategy. You take ownership of difficult problems and know that "just throw more hardware at it" isn't a scaling strategy.
You work AI-first. AI tools are already part of how you operate: you use them to write and review automation code, analyze query plans and logs, draft runbooks, and accelerate incident investigation. You have real judgment about where AI output is reliable and where it isn't, especially against production data systems, and you're building that fluency into your team's practices, not just your own.
Things You'll Do
Keep the lights on
Own the reliability of our caching layer: capacity planning, failover behavior, upgrade strategy, and healthy usage patterns for caches hosted in Redis Enterprise and AWS ElastiCache.
Participate in our on-call rotation and serve as the point of escalation for data-layer issues during production incidents.
Support internal customers day to day, from troubleshooting a slow query to advising on storage usage, and turn recurring questions into documentation and tooling.
