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Zapier is seeking a Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) to join the State team, which owns the platform behind Zapier's stateful services. This includes a relational database fleet (MySQL and PostgreSQL), a caching layer built on Redis and ElastiCache, and tooling for product teams to use the data layer safely and reliably.
In this role, you will be the technical center of gravity for database and cache work at Zapier. You'll set direction on data infrastructure, shape practices around automation, observability, performance, reliability, and disaster recovery, and mentor other engineers on the team. You'll serve as the point person for design reviews, establish operational standards, and grow the DBRE practice over time.
Key responsibilities include:
**Keep the lights on:** Own reliability of the caching layer (capacity planning, failover, upgrades), participate in on-call rotation for production incidents, and support internal customers with troubleshooting and advisory work.
**Make the right way the easy way:** Manage database and cache infrastructure as code using Terraform, build templated standards within the internal platform's golden path, and establish observability (dashboards, alerts, SLOs) for the data layer.
**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, and consult with product teams on schema design and capacity planning.
**Grow the practice:** Lead design reviews, mentor engineers across the team, and turn experience into documentation, patterns, and runbooks.
You'll partner closely with product teams, treating them as customers. You ask about their workloads before prescribing solutions, provide options with tradeoffs, and leave teams more capable than you found them. You document well for asynchronous consumption and participate in an on-call rotation.
You're comfortable shipping code to solve systems problems, automating repetitive work, and building tools that make the team more effective. You work AI-first, using AI tools to write and review automation code, analyze query plans and logs, and accelerate incident investigation, while maintaining sound judgment about reliability and production safety.
**Requirements:**
- 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, including ecosystem extensions and tools
- Understanding of caching (Redis) as part of the data layer, including design and operation at scale
- Experience designing and maintaining highly available, cloud-based database systems in AWS or another cloud platform
- Infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform or similar tooling
- Comfort operating stateful services alongside Kubernetes or other distributed systems
- Experience implementing metrics, logging, and alerting for data systems using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch
- Ability to partner effectively with product teams, asking about workloads and providing options rather than edicts
- Experience mentoring and raising the bar for teams around you
- Comfort digging into application code and launching backend services
