Staff Database Reliability Engineer

Description
As a Staff Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE), you'll be the technical authority and strategic leader for all things related to Drata's database architecture. You'll own the long-term vision for our data infrastructure, guiding engineering teams and driving significant performance and scalability improvements. Your expertise will be key to shaping our architecture as we grow, ensuring our systems are not just reliable, but exceptionally performant and future-proof. You will be a hands-on evangelist for best practices, combining deep-level query optimizations with high-level architectural leadership to truly elevate how we use our data.
What you'll do:

• Lead Strategic Initiatives: Drive the long-term strategy for scaling, resiliency, and performance of our AWS Aurora clusters and replication environments. You'll be the primary architect for our evolving data stack.
• Serve as a Technical Expert & Evangelist: Act as the lead consultant for engineering teams, providing deep technical guidance on data modeling, query optimization, and architectural patterns. You will proactively evangelize best practices for schema design, efficient SQL queries, and index usage across the entire organization, helping to raise the bar for database knowledge company-wide.
• Deep Dive into Performance: Proactively identify and resolve complex performance bottlenecks. You'll use advanced observability tools to analyze and tune difficult queries, data migrations and pinpointing issues before they impact our users.
• Evangelize Architectural Vision: Lead the evaluation, prototyping, and eventual adoption of new database technologies and architectural approaches to meet our growing business needs.
• Own Observability: Take full ownership of our database observability, defining and implementing key metrics and dashboards to ensure we have a comprehensive, real-time view of database health and performance.

What you'll bring:

• Experience: 15+ years of experience with large scale MySQL systems, with a strong emphasis on performance tuning and a deep understanding of its internal architecture.
• Infrastructure: Extensive hands-on experience with AWS Aurora administration and proven expertise in complex performance tuning, backup, and recovery strategies.
• Mentoring: Demonstrated experience guiding and influencing multiple engineering teams on database best practices and architectural decisions.
• SQL: Exceptional expertise in writing, analyzing, and optimizing complex SQL queries and a deep knowledge of relational database design concepts.
• Programming: Proven experience working with Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks (bonus if you have experience with TypeScript and TypeORM).
• Problem-Solving: Exceptional analytical and troubleshooting skills with the ability to dive deep into a problem and emerge with a clear solution.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical issues to a diverse audience. You are a collaborator and a natural leader.
• Bonus points: Experience with AWS Elasticache (Redis), AWS DynamoDB or other NoSQL databases.

This role will receive a competitive base salary, benefits, and stock, typically in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). The applicable salary range for each US-based role is based on where the employee works and is aligned to one of 3 tiers based on the cost of labor for that geographic area. The expected salary ranges for this role are below, subject to change.
Tier 1: $220,800 - $272,700
Tier 2: $198,700 - $245,400
Tier 3: $176,600 - $218,200
You can view which tier applies to where you plan to work here. A variety of factors are considered when determining someone's leveling and compensation-including a candidate's professional background and experience. These ranges may be modified in the future and final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed above.
Drata is on a mission to serve as the trust layer between great companies.
Drata is a trust management platform that uses AI-driven automation to modernize governance, risk, and compliance, helping thousands of businesses develop a more secure, proactive, and risk-aware organization to continuously maintain trust with customers.
We all recognize the importance of earning and keeping the trust of our customers when it comes to protecting their data. We know how burdensome achieving and maintaining a strong GRC posture can be with the rise in compliance regulations. It's a manual, redundant, error-prone, and unscalable process - and it only grows more complex and expensive over time.
Our team of SaaS, security, compliance, and audit experts have built a better way - with automation
Employment at Drata is based solely upon individual merit and qualifications directly related to professional competence. We strictly prohibit unlawful discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, veteran status, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy status, sex, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, mental or physical disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, or any other characteristics protected by law. We also make reasonable accommodations to meet our obligations under laws protecting the rights of the disabled.