[Hiring] Senior Engineer, Database Reliability @Zapier

Role Description

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.
• You'll shape our practices around automation, observability, performance, reliability, and disaster recovery.
• This is the most senior DBRE role on the State team.
• You'll be the technical center of gravity for database and cache work.
• Responsible for growing the DBRE practice on the team over time.

Qualifications

• At least 7 years in systems administration, systems engineering, or software development.
• At least 4 years running production relational databases.
• Deep expertise in MySQL or PostgreSQL and working knowledge of the other.
• Understanding of caching (such as Redis) as part of the data layer.
• Experience designing and maintaining highly available, cloud-based database systems in AWS or another cloud platform.
• Comfortable operating stateful services alongside Kubernetes or other distributed systems.
• Implemented metrics, logging, and alerting for data systems using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch.
• Ability to partner with product teams and document processes well.
• Experience shipping code to solve systems problems and automating repetitive work.
• Familiarity with AI tools and their application in operational tasks.

Requirements

• Own the reliability of our caching layer: capacity planning, failover behavior, upgrade strategy, and healthy usage patterns.
• Participate in our on-call rotation and serve as the point of escalation for data-layer issues during production incidents.
• Support internal customers day to day, from troubleshooting a slow query to advising on storage usage.
• Manage our database and cache infrastructure as code, evolving our 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.
• Identify and implement strategies to improve performance and resilience across our MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis fleets.
• Consult with product teams on schema design, query patterns, and capacity planning.
• Lead design review for data-layer work and mentor engineers across the team.

Benefits

• Zapier is an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.
• We have a non-standard application process designed to promote inclusion and equity.
• Education is not a requirement for our roles.
• We strive to never go more than seven days without letting you know the status of your application.
• Zapier welcomes applications from individuals with disabilities and will work to provide reasonable accommodations.