Senior Platform Engineer — Database Platform

Marriott International is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to join our Database Platform team — an experienced individual contributor with strong software engineering skills, genuine database expertise, and a platform engineering orientation. This role is responsible for designing, automating, and operating production-scale database platforms that are secure-by-default, resilient-by-design, and easy for application teams to consume. 

The engineer will deliver database capabilities through Marriott's Internal Developer Platform, enabling self-service provisioning and a consistent developer experience across Couchbase Capella, AWS Aurora, AWS DocumentDB, and AWS ElastiCache. Working closely with Site Reliability Engineering, Networking, Security, and Application Engineering teams, this role drives large-scale database migrations, builds platform tooling, and serves as a trusted technical advisor on database architecture and operations. 

To be successful in this role, the candidate must bring both orientations in equal measure: strong software engineering and infrastructure automation skills, and depth in database technologies. In addition to technical expertise, success requires the ability to navigate complexity, work collaboratively across teams, and consistently deliver outcomes. 

CANDIDATE PROFILE 

Required: 

• Undergraduate degree in an engineering or computer science discipline and/or equivalent experience 

• 7+ years of combined software engineering and/or infrastructure engineering experience 

• 2+ years production-scale experience and expertise in at least one distributed or document-oriented database technology (e.g., Couchbase, MongoDB, Cassandra, DocumentDB, or Cosmos DB) 

• Proven experience with Infrastructure as Code, particularly Terraform 

• Experience building or contributing to platform engineering capabilities — developer platforms, self-service tooling, or shared infrastructure automation 

• Experience with DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines 

• Experience operating cloud infrastructure at enterprise scale in AWS 

• Proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming or scripting language (Python, Go, or equivalent) 

• Strong cross-team collaboration and communication skills 

Preferred: 

• Experience with Couchbase Server or Couchbase Capella 

• Experience with AWS managed database services (Aurora, DocumentDB, ElastiCache) 

• Experience with event-driven systems or workflow orchestration frameworks 

• Experience with database schema and change management frameworks (e.g., Liquibase) 

• Exposure to compliance automation, policy-as-code, or security posture tooling 

• Experience with observability platforms (e.g., Dynatrace, Datadog) 

• Prior involvement in large-scale database migrations in production environments 

• Backend software development experience (Java, Node.js, Python, or equivalent) 

CORE WORK ACTIVITIES 

Platform Engineering & Automation 

• Design, build, and own database infrastructure provisioning modules and automation pipelines, encoding platform standards for security, availability, and cost. 

• Implement CI/CD automation to standardize and safely deliver database platform changes. 

• Enable self-service database capabilities that allow application teams to execute routine operations independently. 

• Build platform tooling that gives application teams visibility into their database health, security posture, and compliance standing. 

Database Migrations 

• Lead strategic database migrations — including planning, production cutovers, and post-migration validation — in close cooperation with SRE and application teams. 

• Develop migration patterns and standards that can be executed consistently at scale. 

Platform Enablement & Prescriptive Guidance 

• Develop guidance artifacts for supported database platforms. 

• Lead working sessions with application teams on database architecture, performance, and operational readiness. 

• Partner with application teams to identify and close compliance gaps against platform standards. 

Reliability & Disaster Recovery 

• Design and maintain automated disaster recovery capabilities for production database platforms. 

• Partner with SRE teams on monitoring, alerting, reliability, incident management, and post-incident analysis. 

Security & Governance 

• Ensure database platforms are secure-by-default and aligned with enterprise security and compliance standards. 

• Integrate database services with IAM controls, networking, and configuration management systems. 

• Participate in architectural and governance reviews as a database platform subject matter expert. 

Collaboration & Technical Leadership 

• Serve as a senior technical advisor to application teams on database architecture and operational best practices. 

• Mentor engineers and contribute to shared documentation, engineering standards, and patterns. 

• Collaborate with product owners and leadership on roadmap planning and technical prioritization.