Engineering Manager - Database Reliability
About the Role
You will lead the database reliability effort to keep production databases highly available, performant and scalable. You will support engineers designing and operating reliable database systems, run and improve incident response and postmortem practices, drive capacity planning and cost optimisation, and mentor engineers. You will collaborate with infrastructure, product and security teams to implement monitoring, backups, migrations and performance tuning across Postgres, CockroachDB and other data stores.
Requirements
- At least five years of experience as a manager supporting database or storage teams
- Demonstrable people management experience including coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship and career development
- Project management experience including prioritisation, tracking schedules and communicating across teams
- Experience managing process design: on-call rotation, incident response, postmortems, load testing and capacity planning
- Hiring experience: predicting staffing needs, designing interview loops and evaluating candidates
- Proven track record running mission-critical databases in production (replication, backups, migrations, HA/DR)
- Experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration; running database workloads in Kubernetes is a plus
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably GCP, or data center operations
- Located in a timezone between GMT-1 and GMT+3 and willing to travel to Africa ~once per year
Responsibilities
- Lead the database reliability team
- Support engineers in architecting, maintaining and evolving reliable high-performance database technologies across multiple environments
- Mentor and coach a diverse, globally distributed team of database engineers
- Shape and refine incident response, postmortems and capacity planning processes
- Collaborate with infrastructure, product and security teams on platform database initiatives
- Drive best practices for monitoring, cost optimisation and performance tuning
- Hire and grow the team and define database reliability standards
Benefits
- Yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups
- Generous equity package
- Subsidized health insurance for employees and dependents (varies by country)
- Retirement contributions (varies by country)
- Six months of fully paid parental leave
- Subsidized fertility assistance
- Flexible vacation (most employees take 21-30 days, exclusive of statutory holidays)
- $10,000 annual charitable donation matching
- Company-covered travel to operational markets for required annual visits
- Performance reviews twice a year with potential bonuses or promotions