Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Database Focus)
GoCardless2 days ago
Riga, LatviaSenior
Responsibilities
- Run and maintain the production database fleet across self-managed Stolon clusters and GCP Cloud SQL.
- Own database performance, capacity, connection pooling, memory, autovacuum, query tuning, indexing, and scalability.
- Lead major-version upgrades, schema migrations, data migrations, backfills, and platform migrations with minimal downtime.
- Design and test failover, replication, backup, and recovery processes to improve database resilience.
- Build dashboards and alerts using Grafana, Prometheus, and Datadog.
- Partner with application teams to improve database usage and query patterns.
- Participate in on-call rotations, mitigate live database incidents, and conduct root cause analyses.
Requirements
- Typically 5+ years of production experience running PostgreSQL, including high availability, replication, backup, and recovery.
- Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL performance tuning, internals, locking, autovacuum, connection pooling, and production operations.
- Experience running production databases in managed or self-managed cloud environments.
- Strong query analysis skills, including EXPLAIN plans and indexing strategy.
- Experience safely performing major-version upgrades with minimal downtime.
- Experience managing infrastructure as code with Terraform or similar tooling.
- Experience with monitoring and alerting tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog.
- Experience writing code and working in software engineering teams.
- Experience with on-call operations and incident response.
- Ability to influence and support application teams.
- Experience with Stolon or similar PostgreSQL high-availability tooling is preferred.
- Experience with managed cloud PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, GKE, ArgoCD, database migrations, SLOs, error budgets, payments, or financial services is preferred.
Benefits
- Wellbeing support and medical cover.
- Meal voucher or paid lunch when working from the office, depending on location.
- Work away scheme allowing up to 20 working days outside the country of residence in a 12-month period.
- Adaptive Working for flexible work arrangements.
- Parental leave.
- Annual learning budget.
- Generous holiday allowance, volunteer days for ERG events, and one moving day off.
Tech Stack
Categories
Site Reliability
About GoCardless
GoCardless builds a bank payment platform for businesses to collect recurring and one-off payments via Direct Debit, real-time payments, and open banking, with APIs and 350+ integrations. It monetizes through payment processing fees and add-ons for payment success and fraud reduction. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in London, it serves 100,000+ businesses and processes over US$130 billion annually across 30+ countries.