Senior Database Reliability Engineer (PostgreSQL)

About the role

Medallia’s Database Services team is looking for a senior engineer who combines deep PostgreSQL expertise with an automation mindset. You will own the availability, performance and lifecycle of production PostgreSQL clusters that power a global SaaS platform.

Key responsibilities

• Own the availability and performance of production PostgreSQL clusters against defined service level objectives.
• Manage the full database lifecycle: provisioning, configuration, major‑version upgrades, scaling, backup/recovery, replication and high‑availability testing.
• Build monitoring, alerting and low‑noise observability using platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry.
• Automate recurring manual procedures across the database lifecycle with production‑grade tooling and Python scripts.
• Lead incident response, conduct blameless root‑cause analysis and mentor other DBREs.

Required profile

• 5+ years operating PostgreSQL in large‑scale production or SaaS environments.
• Hands‑on experience with capacity planning, backup/point‑in‑time recovery, replication, high‑availability and zero‑downtime upgrades.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex issues spanning database, OS, network and application layers.
• Willingness to participate in on‑call rotations and scheduled maintenance windows.
• Fluent English communication skills.

Required skills

• PostgreSQL internals (MVCC, WAL, vacuum, locking, query planning).
• Kubernetes and containerised database deployments.
• Linux fundamentals, Ansible, CI/CD tools (Jenkins, ArgoCD).
• Python for automation.
• Observability tools: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry.
• HA solutions such as Patroni, PgBouncer, logical replication.
• Experience with public cloud platforms (OCI) and Apache Cassandra.