Sr. Engineer, Database Reliability - Zapier

AI at Zapier

At Zapier, we build and use automation every day to make work more efficient, creative, and human. We encourage using AI tools responsibly and transparently during our hiring process.

Sr. Engineer, Database Reliability

We're looking for a Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) to join the State team at Zapier. We need someone who can set direction on our data infrastructure and isn’t afraid to get into the weeds to solve challenging operational problems.

The State team owns the platform behind Zapier's stateful services: our relational database fleet (MySQL and PostgreSQL), a caching layer built on Redis and ElastiCache, and the tooling that lets product teams use it all easily, safely, and reliably. This is the most senior DBRE role on the State team, serving as the technical center of gravity for database and cache work.

About You

• Experienced database technologist: You have at least 7 years in systems administration, systems engineering, or software development, with at least 4 years running production relational databases. Deep expertise in MySQL or PostgreSQL and working knowledge of the other. Understand caching (such as Redis) at scale.
• Cloud and Infrastructure as Code: You've designed and maintained highly available, cloud-based database systems in AWS, managing infrastructure with Terraform or similar IaC tooling. Comfortable operating stateful services alongside Kubernetes.
• Observability-driven: Implemented metrics, logging, and alerting using Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch. Treat query performance, replication lag, and cache hit rates as first-class signals.
• Product-minded partner: Collaborate with product teams on design, workload analysis, support, and on-call rotations for production data systems. Document things well for asynchronous consumption.
• Bar-raiser for the team: Review peer designs, mentor engineers, and turn lessons learned into documentation, patterns, and runbooks.
• Systems problem solver: Write code to automate repetitive work, build tools, and dig into application code to fix bugs or close gaps in data management.
• AI-first workflow: Use AI tools to write and review automation code, analyze query plans and logs, draft runbooks, and accelerate incident investigation.

Things You'll Do

Keep the lights on

• Own the reliability of our caching layer: capacity planning, failover behavior, upgrade strategy, and healthy usage patterns for Redis Enterprise and AWS ElastiCache.
• Participate in our on-call rotation and serve as the point of escalation for data-layer issues during production incidents.
• Support internal customers, troubleshoot slow queries, advise on storage usage, and turn recurring questions into documentation and tooling.

Make the right way the easy way

• Manage database and cache infrastructure as code, evolving Terraform modules and provisioning workflows.
• Build database and cache templated standards within our internal platform's golden path.
• Build and maintain observability for the data layer: dashboards, alerts, and SLOs.

Shape where the data layer goes next

• Identify and implement strategies to improve performance and resilience across MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis fleets.
• Work with development teams on architectural decisions for new services and technologies.
• Consult with product teams on schema design, query patterns, and capacity planning.

Grow the practice

• Lead design reviews for data-layer work and mentor engineers across the team on database and cache practice.
• Raise the overall bar for how we operate the data layer through documentation and runbooks.