Staff Platform Database Reliability Engineer

Index Exchange is a global advertising supply-side platform operating large-scale, low-latency infrastructure. The Staff Platform Database Reliability Engineer leads strategic and technical initiatives across data systems, ensuring database environments are reliable, scalable, secure, and operationally rigorous.

Responsibilities:

• Provide strategic leadership across multiple domains, collaborating with cross-functional teams such as product, operations, infrastructure, and platform engineering to achieve business objectives
• Foster a culture of innovation, continuous improvement, and collaboration within the data systems team
• Advocate for strategic directions that reduce our complexity and tech stack footprint
• Demonstrate deep expertise some of our core database technologies, including MySQL, MariaDB, Galera, PostgreSQL , Aerospike, Redis, Kafka, Zookeeper, Cassandra/ScyllaDB, etcd, StarRocks, Vertica
• Deploy and operate databases at scale in decentralized cloud (k8s, external) and bare metal-based environments
• Architect relational data structures for performance, scale, and continuity
• Drive technical excellence by staying abreast of industry trends, evaluating emerging technologies, and making recommendations for adoption
• Lead initiatives with other cross-functional engineering staff that are supporters and consumers of your data systems
• Ensure robust operational processes are in place to guarantee the stability and scalability of database environments
• Develop and implement best practices for database administration, monitoring, and maintenance using open-source observability and instrumentation tools
• Develop and enhance testing and production release procedures with an automation-first core principle to end-to-end delivery
• Security/IAM minded practices and implementations, audits, traceability
• Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams, including developers, system administrators, and data scientists, to optimize database performance and functionality
• Communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, fostering understanding and alignment across the organization
• Participate in quarterly planning events to present your roadmaps and ensure strong alignment with the objectives and the broader technology teams
• Lead efforts in problem identification, troubleshooting, and resolution to minimize downtime and enhance our Exchange reliability
• Lead retrospective/rca engagements for data systems to ensure we are on a continuous improvement path

Requirements:

• 7+ years of proven experience as a Database Reliability Engineer, Database Administrator, general SRE with a slant to data systems, or a similar role
• In-depth expertise of databases, with a focus on the specified key technologies (MySQL, MariaDB, Galera, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Aerospike, Redis, StarRocks, Vertica)
• Experience deploying and operating databases at scale in containerized (Kubernetes) and bare metal environments
• Working knowledge of languages like Python, Bash/Shell, Kotlin, Java and/or golang
• Good understanding of automation tools like Ansible, Terraform, and any CI/CD tools (Helm, Gitlab workflows, ArgoCD, etc.)
• Good understanding of database change management systems like Liquibase, Flywheel, or Alembic
• Good understanding of observability tools like Loki, Grafana, Prometheus, etc
• Demonstrated leadership, mentoring, and collaboration skills balancing strategic and tactical needs
• Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting abilities, diagnosing at depth for a globally distributed infrastructure with low-latency requirements
• Effective communication skills, both technical and non-technical audiences
• Basic understanding of streaming and big data technologies like Kafka, Spark, Flink, Hadoop, Presto/Trino, or Redis (desirable)