Engineer, Database Reliability

Syniti enables agile enterprises with silo-free enterprise data management that helps turn complex data challenges into competitive advantages. With a unified, learning platform and one of the world’s largest teams of data-focused experts, enterprises and global alliance partners choose Syniti when they require trusted data to ignite business growth and reduce risks. Syniti is a portfolio company of BridgeGrowth Partners LLC. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts with offices in 25 countries around the world, Syniti operates in all global regions and industry verticals, and maintains a 99.7% client success rate across thousands of complex data projects and initiatives.

General Summary

Syniti’s Cloud Operations team provides 24x7x365 support for all our SaaS & Hosting customers globally.  This business unit is responsible for ensuring the uptime, performance and high availability of all customer operations inside of the SaaS & Hosted environments including multi-tiered applications & microservice architectures as well as large & complex multi-terabyte database systems.   

The Database Reliability Engineer will be responsible for maintaining the health and wellness of our enterprise database systems.  Areas of focus include performance tuning, settings optimizations and deployments, backups, high availability and disaster recovery. You will also be expected to understand and participate in the operation and configuration of the database instances and supporting infrastructure.  This role supports a heterogeneous environment that includes test, development, and production systems running on PostgreSQL and MSSQL with plans for broader support of other sql/no-sql systems in the future.

The ultimate objective will be to minimize toil as much as possible through automated solutions for the day-to-day maintenance, upkeep and operations control tasks needed for database administration, allowing the engineer to focus their efforts on improving the performance of the existing platform and contributing to the design and architecture of new database structures inside the SaaS ecosystem.

An ideal candidate will have the skillsets of both a principal database administrator and a junior to mid-level SRE. 

AWS experience with RDS and Aurora Serverless solutions is a must. 

Preferential consideration will be given to candidates that have experience automating operations tasks using bash, Python, or other equivalent languages.

Key Responsibilities

• Split time equally between operations tickets and project work.
• Manage backups, restores and disaster recover methodologies.
• Contribute to performance tuning and other preventative automation strategies to improve uptime proactively.
• Design and implement database maintenance strategies to ensure optimal health & performance, eliminate configuration drift.
• Development of database automation solutions for the purposes of advanced stored procedure, function and other performance monitoring, alerting.
• Ongoing development of database self-healing and configuration drift prevention automation to reduce toil.
• Serve as technical lead for database responsibilities on customer rollouts and other major projects.
• Create documentation and provide training for database related processes and ops procedures.
• Work on projects to onboard or develop new features and services related to our database architecture from an operations perspective.

Professional Skills & Abilities

• Desire and ability to thrive in a fast-paced, highly demanding, dynamic business and cloud operations environment.
• Understanding of DBRE principles, monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.), and incident response processes.
• The role requires analytical acumen and solution orientation to probe for understanding and to make appropriate decisions to address the nuances of technical and business challenges to achieve the targeted outcome.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail.
• Strong customer service orientation.
• Excellent communication skills and experience in driving cross department initiatives to obtain organizational objectives & meet customer needs.
• Strong communication, presentation, business and technical writing skills.
• The ability to provide excellent customer service as well as manage and build strong relationships both internally and externally.
• Strong interest in further developing and integrating operations with technology in business value creating ways.
• Awareness of emerging issues, including regulations, industry practices and technology.

Technical Skills & Experience

• 9+ years of experience in job specific skills.
• 7+ years of experience with SQL and PostgreSQL administration and development.
• 5+ years of experience with AWS RDS and AWS Aurora Serverless architectures along with familiarity with AWS services (e.g., EC2, S3, Lambda) and their integration with PostgreSQL and MSSQL.

• 5+ years of experience with performance tuning and query optimization.
• 3+ years of Python, Powershell, or equivalent automation development experience.
• 3+ years of experience designing, building, and supporting high availability and disaster recovery environments including backup solutions, transaction replication, point in time recovery, and Always-On High Availability.
• 3+ Experience with solutions for monitoring and alerting of database environments (SentryOne or equivalent tool experience).

• Strong knowledge of develops practices and familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and other infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform.
• Experience working in an Agile/Scrum development environment is a plus.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent experience.

Syniti is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.