Senior Database Reliability Engineer

The Company:

Marigold helps brands foster customer relationships through the science and art of connection. Marigold Relationship Marketing is a suite of world-class martech solutions that help marketers create long term customer love and loyalty. Marigold provides the most comprehensive set of use cases for marketers at any level. Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, Marigold has offices globally across the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South America and Central America, as well as in Japan.
 

The Role:

As a cloud-first modern devops team we need a modern answer for a DBA. We’re seeking a senior database reliability engineer, someone who can blend excellence in database operations and management with devops fundamentals to provide the skills to manage and guide our teams on how to operate our various database systems.

You will be a key member of our NZ/US/PH distributed devops team and be a subject matter expert on database systems to both the devops team, as well as the wider engineering teams at Sailthru.

Sailthru are heavy users of MongoDB with large production multi-shard clusters and to a lesser degree, PostgreSQL (RDS/Aurora), DynamoDB and Redis across our microservices, all operating on AWS with an Infrastructure-as-code approach.

What You’ll Do:

• Primarily subject matter expert responsible for reliable operations of our databases - uptime naturally, but also performance, backup reliability, regular restore testing, cost management and upgrade cycles to keep ahead of EOLs.

• Work with our engineering teams on improving how they interact with the databases, including partnering with teams to improve performance and cost efficiency.

• Work with the wider devops team to manage the AWS resources running the various database workloads to ensure optimal performance 

• Assist the team managers with planning roadmaps and following conventional agile practices.

• Managing infrastructure as code and building safe and reliable automation tools for common database tasks as required.

• Help troubleshoot on active incident calls and work with various teams to ensure fast resolution whilst maintaining a calm collected focus.

• Take part in the on-call rotation, along with the rest of the devops team, as well as some out-of-hours work when required for maintenance windows.

• Maintain and evolve the disaster recovery strategy for our core databases.

About You:

You probably started your career working as a DBA. Then you got curious about devops and saw how you can take a lot of the approaches around the tooling, the methodologies and the philosophy to your work. 

You balance the bias to action, with the need to mitigate risk knowing how critical databases are to any organization. You care strongly about fundamentals and making sure the BCP/DR plans are solid just as much as you care about exciting new features being released.

You’re pragmatic, we need you to work on a mix of NoSQL and SQL databases, each with their own quirks and features, but that’s ok - every new platform is a new opportunity to learn something exciting and apply a different tool to a specific challenge.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience administering database systems. We recognise you might not have worked with *all* of our technologies, our preference is strong experience in MongoDB and willingness to learn and work with the others, but we’ll consider strong comparable experience. Comparable experience would be some other large database systems which utilized sharding, 10+TB of active documents/rows and high demand for high uptimes in transactional workload environments.

• 3+ years working in cloud-first environments, ideally AWS but comparable Azure/GCP considered.

• Strong Linux operating system fundamentals.

• An understanding and appreciation of administering infrastructure as code using a platform like Terraform, Pulumi or CDK.

• Experience working with containerized platforms, ideally Kubernetes.

• A passion to collaborate and support others, whether members of your team, the wider engineering department or some other org entirely.

What We Offer: 

• The table-stakes benefits you’d expect including: medical/dental/vision, life and disabilities insurance.

• Generous time off (we call it Open Time Away) as well as paid holidays and a birthday benefit day off.

• 401k plan with a company match on your contributions.

• Employee-centric and supportive remote work environment with flexibility.

• Support for life events including paid parental leave.