Principal Software Developer – Databases

Role Overview

• Lead design and implementation of high-impact SRS platform capabilities: event platform CDC integration (Kafka), schema automation, Structured Record Access API, fleet management tooling
• Set technical direction for one or more SRS sub-areas: architecture standards, design reviews, raising the bar on how the team builds
• Continuously assess SRS cloud platform needs at scale, identify significant risks and gaps, and drive the roadmap to close them
• Own and improve fleet-wide operations: capacity management, monitoring and alerting, query tuning, load optimization, and data replication for reporting workloads
• Create and institutionalize best practices and health models for the database fleet; use observability tooling and AWS automation to enforce standards consistently across hundreds of managed databases
• Build a high-impact network of storage champions across engineering groups, consult directly with product teams and group leads on storage readiness and risk, and select training opportunities that raise engineering capability division-wide
• Own reliability for what you build: monitoring, runbooks, on-call response, post-incident learning
• Partner with SRS area leadership across managed database platform, DevEx, and data warehousing to sequence work and make cross-team tradeoffs
• Drive migration and schema lifecycle initiatives across the fleet, coordinating with product teams, managing rollout risk, validating rollback coverage
• Mentor P2/P3 engineers; conduct design and code reviews with real feedback
• Represent SRS technical requirements in cross-org forums: architecture review, group leadership
• Provide tactical leadership during production emergencies

Requirements

• 6+ years of software engineering in a platform, infrastructure, or data engineering context
• 5+ years of Kubernetes architecture at scale
• 7+ years of Terraform experience
• 7+ years of experience with cloud data technologies
• Deep Postgres or DynamoDB experience at scale: fleet-level operations, not application-level use
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects end-to-end: design through production
• Hands-on Kafka or event streaming experience in production; bonus if you've built CDC pipelines (Postgres binlog, DynamoDB Streams, Debezium)
• ORM experience at the framework or platform layer: you've built or extended ORM tooling to drive semantic eventing, not just consumed it
• Kubernetes CRD hands-on experience: designing or operating controllers/operators that manage platform resources
• Strong AWS background: IAM, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, ECS/EKS, multi-region
• Able to drive technical alignment across opinionated teams; you've gotten three engineers with different opinions to agree on an approach
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and GitOps deployment experience
• Strong communication and organizational skills; you can influence outcomes across teams, groups, and leadership.

Tech Stack

• AWS
• Cloud
• DynamoDB
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Postgres
• Terraform

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package