Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA) - Backblaze

Backblaze is a leader in object storage within the open cloud movement, empowering customer success with cloud storage designed to optimize budgets, simplify administration, and foster innovation. Founded in 2007, Backblaze scaled with minimal external funding before its 2021 Nasdaq IPO. Today, the company generates over $100M in revenue, managing over three billion gigabytes of data for 500K+ customers across 175+ countries.

Backblaze is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA) to join its team.

About the Role

This role is responsible for ensuring the stability, scalability, and reliability of Backblaze's production database systems, primarily Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra, alongside other production services and infrastructure. This position includes on-call, incident response, and service ownership expectations typical of SRE III roles, with a deep technical focus on database systems.

As the SRE Database Engineering function is new, this role will be instrumental in establishing its operational foundation. This includes designing database architecture and developing runbooks, escalation guidance, procedures, and training materials for Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers. The ideal candidate will have strong experience with production database systems, Linux, automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes, observability, and incident response, demonstrating a proactive approach to reliability and operational excellence.

What You'll Do

Database Architecture & Administration

• Design, deploy, and own highly available database architecture for Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra.
• Establish and document operational procedures, runbooks, and escalation guidance for Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers.
• Optimize database performance through query tuning, indexing strategies, schema design, and capacity planning.
• Own database backup, recovery, replication, and disaster recovery strategies.
• Perform and validate disaster recovery testing and database recovery procedures.
• Drive database security, access control, patching, hardening, and compliance practices.
• Partner with the DBA and Data Infrastructure teams on resharding, capacity planning, replication, and architecture decisions for sharded MySQL environments.

Service Reliability & Operations

• Support the availability and durability of critical services across production environments.
• Monitor service health using SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, monitoring, logging, and alerting platforms.
• Partner with service owners to define and improve SLIs, SLOs, error budget policies, and alerting.
• Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
• Serve as an escalation point for complex database production incidents.
• Follow established ITIL/OSS processes including incident, change, problem, and capacity management.
• Take ownership of operational issues and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.

Automation & Tooling

• Develop automation for common operational and database administration tasks to reduce manual intervention and operational toil.
• Contribute to monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks including Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, and ELK.
• Help integrate operational runbooks and incident response workflows with FireHydrant.
• Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools including Terraform, Ansible, and Jenkins.
• Develop scripts using Bash, Python, Go, or similar technologies to improve reliability and operational efficiency.
• Operate and troubleshoot containerized production environments using Kubernetes and Docker.
• Work within Kubernetes and Vitess environments using technologies such as kubectl, mysqlsh, and Vitess keyspaces.

Project Management

• Lead Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs) for functionality being handed off from engineering partner teams.
• Support the operational readiness of new database-backed services before they enter production.
• Build training plans, onboarding materials, and technical documentation for new Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Operations, and DBA/Data Infrastructure teams on reliability initiatives.
• Assist with capacity planning, disaster recovery exercises, database migrations, and infrastructure projects.
• Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
• Identify opportunities for automation and process efficiency.

Incident Response

• Respond to and resolve production database, infrastructure, and service incidents.
• Troubleshoot and escalate database, Linux, networking, application, and infrastructure issues as needed.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and serve as an escalation point for database-related incidents.
• Lead or contribute to root cause analysis and post-incident reviews.
• Identify recurring issues and develop long-term corrective actions to improve reliability.

What We Value

• A proactive mindset with a can-do attitude.
• Someone who can work independently, take ownership, and drive complex technical problems through resolution.
• Someone who steps up, supports teammates, mentors others, and shares knowledge freely.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a willingness to learn new technologies.
• Curiosity, reliability, and a desire to improve the reliability and scalability of production systems.

Required Qualifications

• 6–8 years of experience in site reliability engineering, systems engineering, infrastructure operations, database engineering, or similar roles, with meaningful experience supporting production database systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with MySQL and distributed or sharded database systems.
• Experience with Vitess in a production environment strongly preferred.
• Experience administering and supporting NoSQL databases such as Cassandra.
• Experience designing high-availability database architecture, replication topology, backup strategies, and disaster recovery processes.
• Strong SQL skills, including query performance analysis, indexing, schema design, and troubleshooting.
• Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Experience with security-focused operations including patching, system hardening, access controls, and vulnerability remediation.
• Strong understanding of service reliability concepts including monitoring, alerting, incident response, root cause analysis, SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Experience working with containers and orchestration platforms including Kubernetes and Docker.
• Comfortable operating in Kubernetes and Vitess environments using tools such as kubectl, mysqlsh, and Vitess keyspaces.
• Experience with infrastructure and configuration management technologies including Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, and HashiCorp products such as Vault and Nomad.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language such as Python, Bash, or Go.
• Experience establishing operational procedures, runbooks, documentation, and escalation processes.
• Experience mentoring, training, or helping onboard engineers into complex technical environments.
• Experience in SaaS, cloud services, service provider, or large-scale distributed systems environments preferred.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar cloud platforms preferred.
• Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLA/SLO management preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Backblaze Perks

• Healthcare for family, including dental and vision.
• Competitive compensation and 401K.
• RSU grants for full-time employees.
• ESPP program.
• Flexible vacation policy.
• Maternity & paternity leave.
• MacBook Pro for work, plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation.
• Childcare bonus (human children only).
• Fertility treatment and support.
• Learning & development program.
• Commuter benefits.
• Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance.

Salary Range

The expected salary range for this role is $125,000 - $150,000.

At Backblaze, diversity, equity, and inclusion are core values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.

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