Senior Database Reliability Engineer

$5,000 - $9,500 per month (Gross in USD)

With a mission to financially empower the next generation, Sezzle is revolutionizing the shopping experience beyond payments, blending cutting‑edge tech with seamless, interest‑free installment plans that make shopping smarter and more accessible. We’re not just transforming payments; we’re redefining how people discover, interact with, and purchase the things they love while driving real impact on merchant sales through increased conversions and higher order values.

As we continue to shape the future of fintech and retail, we’re building an innovative, dynamic team passionate about creating more than just a transaction but a truly unique shopping journey. If you’re excited about pushing boundaries in tech and delivering a game‑changing experience for consumers and merchants alike, come join us at Sezzle and help create the future of shopping!

Senior Database Reliability Engineer

We are seeking a technically strong, hands‑on engineer who can combine deep database knowledge with software engineering, infrastructure engineering, and platform thinking. This role focuses on designing, building, and scaling the database platform used across Sezzle’s applications.

• Design, build, and maintain shared database platform components used by Sezzle applications, such as connection packages, client libraries, migration tooling, safety checks, query standards, and developer‑facing abstractions.
• Establish reliable, scalable patterns for how Sezzle services connect to and interact with relational databases across production, staging, and development environments.
• Partner with backend engineering teams to improve database usage in application code, including connection lifecycle, transaction handling, retries, timeouts, pooling, query patterns, and migration workflows.
• Build automation and internal tooling that makes database operations safer, more repeatable, and less dependent on manual intervention.
• Define and enforce engineering standards for database access, schema design, migrations, indexing, query performance, connection management, and operational readiness.
• Architect and improve database infrastructure across AWS RDS/Aurora MySQL, PostgreSQL, RDS Proxy, read replicas, backups, failover, parameter groups, monitoring, and capacity planning.
• Lead database reliability initiatives that reduce operational risk, improve performance, and help Sezzle scale safely.
• Review application designs and database changes early in the development lifecycle to ensure reliability, scalability, maintainability, and security from the start.
• Build guardrails for database migrations, including automated checks, rollback expectations, schema review workflows, migration observability, and production safety controls.
• Improve developer self‑service for database provisioning, access, schema management, local development, testing, and observability.
• Investigate production database issues by combining application telemetry, database metrics, logs, query plans, traces, and cloud infrastructure data.
• Identify and fix systemic database problems, such as bad access patterns, unsafe migrations, inefficient queries, connection storms, lock contention, replication lag, and capacity bottlenecks.
• Create and maintain high‑signal dashboards, alerts, SLOs, SLIs, runbooks, and operational readiness checks for database‑backed services.
• Drive improvements in backup validation, restore testing, disaster recovery, failover readiness, and business continuity.
• Work with security and compliance teams to improve database access controls, auditability, encryption, secrets management, least privilege, and PCI/SOC 2‑aligned controls.
• Mentor engineers on database design, query performance, safe migrations, operational readiness, and production debugging.
• Use automation and AI tooling where appropriate to improve migration review, query analysis, incident investigation, documentation, and developer productivity.

• 6+ years of professional software engineering, infrastructure engineering, database engineering, SRE, or platform engineering experience.
• Strong software engineering ability in at least one production programming language such as Go, Python, or TypeScript.
• Proven ability to build production‑quality internal tools, libraries, frameworks, services, or platform components used by other engineers.
• Deep hands‑on experience with relational databases, especially MySQL and/or PostgreSQL, in high‑availability production environments.
• Strong understanding of how application code interacts with databases, including connection pooling, transactions, isolation levels, retries, timeouts, deadlocks, locking, migrations, and query execution.
• Experience designing or improving shared database access patterns, internal packages, ORM wrappers, migration frameworks, or developer‑facing tooling.
• Hands‑on experience with AWS RDS/Aurora, including provisioning, upgrades, replicas, backups, failover, monitoring, parameter tuning, and production troubleshooting.
• Experience with database connection management technologies such as RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, ProxySQL, or application‑level pooling.
• Strong ability to analyze database performance using query plans, indexes, slow‑query logs, wait events, locks, metrics, and application traces.
• Strong understanding of observability for database‑backed applications, including metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, alerting, and incident response.
• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code and CI/CD systems such as Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Kubernetes, Helm, or similar tooling.
• Ability to influence engineering teams through clear design reviews, documentation, technical standards, and practical implementation.
• Ability to operate independently, identify high‑impact problems, propose pragmatic solutions, and drive them to completion.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

• Experience building platform capabilities for a microservices environment.
• Experience with Golang application development and database access patterns.
• Experience creating database libraries, SDKs, service templates, migration frameworks, or paved‑road developer tooling.
• Experience improving database reliability across many services or teams, not just one application.
• Experience with fintech, payments, banking, e‑commerce, or other high‑volume transactional systems.
• Experience with compliance‑sensitive environments such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, or SOX.
• Experience with database access governance, audit logging, secrets management, encryption, IAM authentication, and least‑privilege access models.
• Experience with large‑scale operational automation for provisioning, patching, failover testing, backup validation, access management, or schema review.
• Experience with distributed systems patterns such as transactional outbox, event‑driven architecture, idempotency, queues, eventual consistency, and data consistency tradeoffs.
• Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, Performance Insights, OpenTelemetry, or New Relic.
• Familiarity with Elasticsearch or other supporting data stores.
• Familiarity with AI developer tooling such as Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, Cursor, and using it to be a more productive engineer.

• You have relentlessly high standards and continually raise the bar for yourself and others.
• You’re not bound by convention and develop new ways to solve problems.
• You need action—speed matters and you take calculated risks.
• You earn trust by listening attentively, speaking candidly, and treating others respectfully.
• You have backbone; you respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree and commit to them fully.
• You deliver results, focusing on key inputs and delivering with quality and timeliness.
• Languages: Golang, TypeScript, Python.
• Frontend: TypeScript – React and React Native.
• Version Control: Git.
• CI/CD: GitLab.
• Testing: Developer and AI‑driven, focusing on automated end‑to‑end, integration, and unit tests.
• Open source mindset: Sezzle builds what we can before buying.

Remote, full‑time.

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