[Hiring] Site Reliability Engineer II (DBA) @Backblaze

Role Description

We are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with a DBA (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 services and infrastructure. This role operates within procedures and runbooks established by our senior DBA SREs, and focuses on building automation, maintaining observability, and supporting incident response to keep customer-facing systems performing at their best.

The SRE will collaborate with engineering, product, and operations teams to embed reliability practices into day-to-day development and operations while contributing to tools and processes that improve efficiency and reduce manual effort.

Key Responsibilities

• Database Administration
  • Operating and maintaining high-availability database systems — primarily Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra — against established architecture and runbooks.
  • Optimizing database performance through query tuning, indexing strategies, and schema design.
  • Executing documented backup, recovery, and replication procedures to ensure data durability; escalating architecture-level changes to senior DBA SREs.
  • Ensuring database security compliance and access control.
• Service Reliability & Operations
  • Support the availability and durability of critical services across production environments.
  • Monitor service health using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and escalate issues when thresholds are at risk.
  • Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.
  • Follow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).
• Automation & Tooling
  • Develop automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.
  • Contribute to monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant.
  • Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
  • Write scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.
• Collaboration
  • Partner with engineering, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations.
  • Assist in capacity planning and disaster recovery exercises.
  • Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
  • Document systems, share learnings, and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.
• Continuous Improvement
  • Contribute to playbooks, runbooks, and operational documentation.
  • Identify recurring issues and propose long-term improvements.
  • Promote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 2–4 years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations centered around database systems.
• Exposure to large-scale, production-grade systems.

Requirements

• Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Familiarity with service reliability concepts - monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go).
• Understanding of containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts.
• Knowledge of incident response and operational best practices.
• Hands-on experience with MySQL performance tuning, replication, and disaster recovery.
• Proficiency in SQL and NoSQL database management.

Preferred Attributes

• Experience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment.
• Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLO/SLA’s.
• Strong problem-solving skills and willingness to learn new technologies.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Ability to work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.