Sr. Engineer, Database Reliability

We're looking for a Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) to join the State team at Zapier. The State team owns the platform behind Zapier's stateful services: a relational database fleet (MySQL and PostgreSQL), a caching layer built on Redis and ElastiCache, and the tooling that lets product teams use it safely and reliably. This is a senior DBRE role and the technical center of gravity for database and cache work on the team.

Responsibilities

Own the reliability of the caching layer, including capacity planning, failover behavior, upgrade strategy, and healthy usage patterns for caches hosted in Redis Enterprise and AWS ElastiCache; participate in the 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 slow queries to advising on storage usage, and turn recurring questions into documentation and tooling; manage database and cache infrastructure as code, evolving Terraform modules and provisioning workflows; build database and cache templated standards within the internal platform's golden path; build and maintain observability for the data layer, including dashboards, alerts, and SLOs; identify and implement strategies to improve performance and resilience across MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis fleets; make architectural decisions with development teams about new services and technologies; consult with product teams on schema design, query patterns, and capacity planning; lead design review for data-layer work and mentor engineers on database and cache practice; raise the overall bar for how the data layer is operated through docs, patterns, and runbooks

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 their extensions and tools; understanding of caching (such as Redis) as part of the data layer, including design and operation at scale and the tradeoffs between caching and the database; experience designing and maintaining highly available cloud-based database systems in AWS or another cloud platform; managing infrastructure as code with Terraform or similar tooling; experience 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; participation in an on-call rotation for production data systems; experience using AI tools to write and review automation code, analyze query plans and logs, draft runbooks, and accelerate incident investigation