Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA)

Backblaze is an open cloud object storage company helping customers use scalable cloud storage solutions. The Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA) will ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of production database systems, primarily Vitess and Cassandra, while owning database architecture, administration, automation, incident response, and operational readiness. The role will also establish procedures, runbooks, training materials, and reliability practices for the SRE Database Engineering function.

Responsibilities:

• Design, deploy, and own highly available database architecture for Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra
• Establish and document operational procedures, runbooks, and escalation guidance for Level 1 and Level 2 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
• Partner with the DBA and Data Infrastructure teams on resharding, capacity planning, replication, and architecture decisions for sharded MySQL environments
• 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
• Serve as an escalation point for complex database production incidents
• Follow established ITIL/OSS processes including incident, change, problem, and capacity management
• Take ownership of operational issues and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution
• Develop automation for common operational and database administration tasks to reduce manual intervention and operational toil
• Contribute to monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks including Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, and ELK
• Help 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 to improve reliability and operational efficiency
• Operate and troubleshoot containerized production environments using Kubernetes and Docker
• Work within Kubernetes and Vitess environments using technologies such as kubectl, mysqlsh, and Vitess keyspaces
• Lead Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs) for functionality being handed off from engineering partner teams
• Support the operational readiness of new database-backed services before they enter production
• Build training plans, onboarding materials, and technical documentation for new Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Operations, and DBA/Data Infrastructure teams on reliability initiatives
• Assist with capacity planning, disaster recovery exercises, database migrations, and infrastructure projects
• Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance
• Identify opportunities for automation and process efficiency
• Respond to and resolve production database, infrastructure, and service incidents
• Troubleshoot and escalate database, Linux, networking, application, and infrastructure issues as needed
• Participate in the on-call rotation and serve as an escalation point for database-related incidents
• Lead or contribute to root cause analysis and post-incident reviews
• Identify recurring issues and develop long-term corrective actions to improve reliability

Requirements:

• 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 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 including monitoring, alerting, incident response, root cause analysis, SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
• Experience working with containers and orchestration platforms including Kubernetes and Docker
• Comfortable operating in Kubernetes and Vitess environments using tools such as kubectl, mysqlsh, and Vitess keyspaces
• Experience with infrastructure and configuration management technologies including Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, and HashiCorp products such as Vault and Nomad
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language such as Python, Bash, or Go
• Experience establishing operational procedures, runbooks, documentation, and escalation processes
• Experience mentoring, training, or helping onboard engineers into complex technical environments
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
• Experience with Vitess in a production environment
• 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