Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Senior Database Reliability Engineer

We're looking for a Senior Database Reliability Engineer who thinks like a data engineer, not just a DBA — someone who treats data as a platform, not a collection of instances to keep patched. You'll own the reliability, performance, and architecture of our database estate across multiple technologies (relational, NoSQL, caching, time-series, and warehouse), and you'll be a standing voice in architectural and product decisions about how data is stored, moved, and consumed across the organization — not just called in after the design is finalized. You'll also own the health of our database environments themselves — debugging and improving the tooling, provisioning, and developer experience around data, so engineering teams can move fast without fighting the platform.

In this role, you'll be part of a team of engineers and technology experts, delivering mission-critical services that help our customers manage, protect, and maintain millions of endpoints and servers. You will have the opportunity to design and develop high-availability software systems that support our global operations.

Location - We are flexible on remote working from home, if you are located in the USA and reside in one of the following states - CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, IL, KS, ME, MA, MD, NJ, NC, NY, OR, TN, TX, VA, OH and WA. We have physical offices in Austin, TX and Tampa, FL, if you prefer a hybrid option.

Onsite interviews may be required for this role.

We hire the best software engineers, but experience in our stack can't hurt: NinjaOne is built on Java, Kotlin, C++, Golang and Postgres, supporting millions of user endpoints and running as a scalable cloud service in AWS. Knowing large-scale datastore bottlenecks, asynchronous application design and client-server architecture is crucial for this role.

Key Responsibilities

• Own architectural and lifecycle decisions for the data domain — technology selection, deprecation, capacity planning, and long-term platform direction — as a standing collaborator with Architecture, not an implementer brought in after decisions are made
• Design, operate, and evolve database platforms across multiple technologies: relational, or equivalent time-series stores and data warehouse systems
• Partner with Architecture and Engineering on product and feature decisions that touch data — schema design, access patterns, scalability tradeoffs — early in the design process
• Debug and resolve environment and developer-experience issues across database tooling, provisioning, and local/CI data infrastructure — reduce friction for engineering teams working with data
• Collaborate with Architecture on expanding the technology footprint of the data platform — evaluating and onboarding new database and storage technologies as product needs evolve
• Maintain overall health of database environments: performance, availability, disaster recovery, backup/retention, and security controls across the estate
• Optimize performance, indexing, query plans, and storage/compute configuration across heterogeneous data stores
• Automate provisioning, backup, and lifecycle management; integrate database changes into CI/CD
• Lead migrations, version upgrades, and technology transitions with minimal disruption
• Maintain audit logs, schema versioning, and change tracking for regulatory traceability (SOC 2, FedRAMP, HIPAA as applicable)
• Document architecture decisions, operational runbooks, and platform standards for both technical and non-technical audiences

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years in database engineering/administration, including 3+ years operating more than one database technology in production.
• Demonstrated experience influencing architecture or product decisions involving data — not solely operating systems designed by others
• Deep expertise in at least one relational engineplus working fluency in NoSQL caching.
• Experience with time-series data stores and data warehouse platforms (Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery, or similar)
• Strong cloud-native experience (AWS preferred) — RDS/Aurora, managed NoSQL, IAM, encryption, networking for data services
• Proficiency in scripting/automation and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Track record of debugging developer-facing environment issues, not just production incidents
• Strong troubleshooting using logs, metrics, and query analysis across varied storage engines
• Excellent written and verbal communication — able to represent the data domain in cross-functional architecture discussions

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with containerized/orchestrated database deployments (Kubernetes, Fargate)
• Cross-cloud data platform experience (GCP, Azure)
• Exposure to distributed systems and data parti