Staff Database Platform Engineer

Demandbase is hiring a Staff Database Platform Engineer to lead the evolution of how they manage databases in the cloud. The role focuses on designing automation and self-service frameworks for database management while providing technical leadership to a global team and ensuring database reliability at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Build the Database Platform of the Future: Design automation and self-service frameworks for provisioning, scaling, and securing databases across AWS (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB) and other cloud-native stores
• Develop Infrastructure-as-Code modules (Terraform, Helm, Gitlab CI/CD) to eliminate manual operations
• Establish best practices for service-level databases in a microservices architecture (Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, etc.)
• Evaluate and guide architectural decisions for large-scale analytical and ETL workloads — helping the company choose the right data technologies (e.g., RDS/Aurora, BigQuery, Iceberg or other cloud-native solutions) to balance performance, cost, and scalability
• Implement observability solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenSearch) for database health at scale
• Ensure availability, performance, and security of existing large-scale monolithic databases powering critical platform functions
• Lead efforts to reduce risk, cost, and complexity in these systems while preparing them for migration or replacement
• Guide safe transition of workloads from shared monolithic environments toward decentralized, service-owned models
• Collaborate with product/platform teams on schema design, query optimization, and database best practices
• Provide tools, documentation, and onboarding support that empower teams to safely own and manage their databases
• Mentor DBREs to evolve from traditional DBA skillsets toward platform engineering and automation-first practices
• Influence organizational culture toward shift-left ownership of databases
• Participate in incident response/postmortems across both monolithic and service-owned systems

Requirements:

• 10 years of experience in database reliability, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure roles
• Strong experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation (Terraform, Helm, GitLab CI/CD, Kubernetes Operators, etc.)
• Proficiency with cloud-managed relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL on RDS/Aurora) and cloud-native databases (DynamoDB)
• Proficiency with performance tuning, query optimization, and schema design
• Experience modernizing and migrating legacy databases (including those used as ETL sources) into more scalable or fit-for-purpose systems, in partnership with data engineering/warehouse teams
• Solid Linux skills and scripting (Python, Shell)
• Hands-on experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenSearch, or similar) and passionate about building reliable monitoring/alerting frameworks
• Demonstrated ability to mentor DBREs/DBAs into platform engineers, and to influence engineering culture toward shift-left ownership of databases
• Excellent communicator and collaborator — able to bridge product, platform, DBRE, and data teams
• Experience guiding organizations through monolithic-to-microservices or shared-to-service-owned database transitions
• Familiarity with big data/streaming systems (Kafka, Spark, etc.) and their intersection with service-level databases