Sr. Engineer, Database Reliability
Zapier · Engineering · Senior · 25d ago
$174k – $261k
per year
Open to candidates across North America.
Direct from the employer's own careers page
Who can apply
Read straight from the listing, so you know before you spend time on it.
Open to candidates across North America.
“NAMER”
The role is open across North America (NAMER).
- Async-first
- Knowledge sharing and documentation are emphasized so work can be consumed asynchronously.
- Contractor / B2B
- No mention of hiring international contractors or invoicing.
- Global stipend
- No home office or equipment budget mentioned.
- Annual retreat
- No company-paid get-togethers mentioned.
Read from the listing automatically. Always confirm the details with the company before you accept an offer.
About the role
As a Senior Database Reliability Engineer on the State team, you will act as the technical anchor for Zapier's stateful services, including relational database fleets (MySQL and PostgreSQL) and a distributed caching layer (Redis and ElastiCache). You will shape practices around automation, observability, performance, reliability, and disaster recovery while guiding internal product engineering teams to scale safely.
What you'll do
- Own the reliability, capacity planning, failover behavior, and upgrade strategy of database and caching fleets.
- Manage database and cache infrastructure as code using Terraform modules and safe provisioning workflows.
- Participate in the on-call rotation and act as an escalation point for production incidents involving the data layer.
- Build and maintain observability, dashboards, alerts, and SLOs across MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis deployments.
- Consult with internal product teams on schema design, query patterns, and architecture decisions.
- Document runbooks, patterns, and golden paths to enable asynchronous knowledge sharing and developer self-service.
What you bring
- At least 7 years in systems administration, systems engineering, or software development.
- At least 4 years running production relational databases, with deep expertise in MySQL or PostgreSQL and working knowledge of the other.
- Experience managing and operating caching layers (e.g., Redis, AWS ElastiCache) at scale.
- Demonstrated experience managing cloud-based database infrastructure in AWS using Terraform or similar IaC tooling.
- Proficiency building observability and alerting with tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch.
- Familiarity with leveraging AI tools to write automation code, analyze query plans, and investigate incidents.
About Zapier
Zapier is a leading workflow automation platform that helps millions of businesses connect their apps and automate repetitive work.
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