Senior CockroachDB Database Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer

Job Title: Senior CockroachDB Database Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Location: Austin, TX /Sunnyvale, CA (Onsite)

Duration: Long Term

Job Description:

We are seeking a highly skilled CockroachDB Database Engineer with strong Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) experience to design, implement, manage, and optimize large-scale distributed database platforms. The ideal candidate will have hands-on expertise in CockroachDB administration, performance tuning, high availability, disaster recovery, automation, observability, and operational reliability. The role requires close collaboration with development, infrastructure, and platform engineering teams to ensure highly available, resilient, and scalable database services.

Design, deploy, administer, and maintain production-grade CockroachDB clusters across cloud and on-premises environments.

Monitor database health, performance, latency, throughput, and resource utilization to ensure service reliability and availability.

Implement and manage backup, restore, disaster recovery, and business continuity strategies.

Perform database capacity planning, performance tuning, indexing, and query optimization.

Develop automation scripts and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) solutions to streamline provisioning, upgrades, and operational tasks.

Establish and manage SRE practices including Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Error Budgets.

Drive incident management, root cause analysis (RCA), postmortems, and preventive remediation activities.

Build and maintain monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, or similar platforms.

Collaborate with DevOps and Engineering teams to improve platform reliability, scalability, security, and operational excellence.

Support production releases, database migrations, version upgrades, and platform modernization initiatives.

Participate in on-call rotation and provide support for critical production incidents.

Implement database security controls, access governance, auditing, and compliance best practices.

Required Skills

Database Technologies 

Strong hands-on experience with CockroachDB Administration

Expertise in distributed SQL databases and cluster management

Database performance tuning and query optimization

Backup, recovery, replication, and data protection strategies

High Availability and Disaster Recovery architecture

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) 

Strong understanding of SRE principles and operational excellence

Experience defining and tracking SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets

Incident response, RCA, and reliability engineering practices

Production monitoring, observability, and capacity management

Reliability automation and operational process improvement

Cloud & Automation 

Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, etc.)

Linux/Unix administration

Scripting using Python, Shell, or Go

CI/CD pipeline integration and automation

Preferred Qualifications 

Experience supporting large-scale, mission-critical distributed systems.

Knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized deployments.

Experience with observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, or Splunk.

Understanding of security, compliance, and governance requirements for database platforms.

CockroachDB certification or equivalent distributed database expertise is highly desirable.

Soft Skills 

Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.

Excellent stakeholder communication and collaboration skills.

Ability to work independently in a fast-paced production environment.

Strong ownership mindset with a focus on reliability and customer experience.

Nice-to-Have 

Experience with PostgreSQL internals (CockroachDB compatibility layer).

Experience with distributed systems, consensus mechanisms, and multi-region architectures.

Exposure to FinTech, Retail, E-Commerce, or large-scale cloud-native platforms.