Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA) - Backblaze

About Backblaze

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

Founded in 2007, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries. We are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA) in LATAM to join our team!

About the Role

We are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer III with a Database Administration focus to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production database systems, primarily Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra, alongside the rest of our production services and infrastructure.

This database specialization is layered on top of the full SRE III scope on the team. You will carry the same on-call, incident response, and service ownership expectations as other SRE IIIs, with database systems serving as your area of deepest technical ownership.

Because our SRE Database Engineering function is new, this role will also help establish its operational foundation by designing database architecture and developing the runbooks, escalation guidance, procedures, and training materials that Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers will use as they onboard.

Responsibilities

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 L1 and L2 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.
• Serve as an escalation point for complex database production incidents.
• Partner with 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.
• Follow established ITIL/OSS processes including incident, change, problem, and capacity management.
• Take ownership of operational issues and drive projects from discovery through resolution.

Automation & Tooling

• Develop automation for common operational and database administration tasks to reduce toil.
• Contribute to monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks including Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, and ELK.
• 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.
• Operate and troubleshoot containerized production environments using Kubernetes and Docker.
• Work within Kubernetes and Vitess environments using tools like kubectl, mysqlsh, and Vitess keyspaces.
• Work with HashiCorp technologies including Terraform, Vault, and Nomad.

Project Management & Collaboration

• Lead Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs) for functionality handed off from engineering partner teams.
• Support operational readiness of new database-backed services before production release.
• Build training plans, onboarding materials, and technical documentation for L1 and L2 engineers.
• Partner across Engineering, Product, Operations, and Data Infrastructure teams on reliability initiatives.
• Work with vendors to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.

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 (monitoring, alerting, incident response, root cause analysis, SLIs, SLOs, error budgets).
• Experience working with containers and orchestration platforms including Kubernetes and Docker.
• Experience with infrastructure and configuration management technologies (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, Vault, Nomad).
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct production experience with Vitess.
• Experience with large-scale distributed or sharded MySQL environments.
• Experience with Cassandra or similar distributed NoSQL databases at scale.
• Experience in SaaS, cloud services, service provider, or large-scale distributed systems environments.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar cloud platforms.
• Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLA/SLO management.
• Experience leading Production Readiness Reviews.