Senior Database Reliability Engineer

🕒 May 6

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Sezzle

WebsiteLinkedInAll Job Openings

201 - 500 employees

Founded 2016

💳 Fintech

👥 B2C

🛍️ eCommerce

Fintech • B2C • eCommerce

Sezzle is a financial technology company that offers a "buy now, pay later" service, allowing consumers to purchase products and pay for them in four interest-free installments over six weeks. The Sezzle app provides users with a flexible financing alternative to traditional credit cards, enabling instant approval decisions without impacting credit scores. Sezzle partners with various top brands, including Amazon, Walmart, and Target, to offer in-app and in-store payment options. The company's mission is to empower consumers financially by providing more financial freedom and control. It is available as a mobile app, with millions of downloads and high user ratings, and works towards accessibility and inclusion on its platform.

📋 Description

• Design, build, and maintain shared database platform components used by Sezzle applications, such as database connection packages, database client libraries, migration tooling, safety checks, query standards, and developer-facing abstractions. • Establish reliable, scalable patterns for how Sezzle services connect to and interact with relational databases across production, staging, and development environments. • Partner with backend engineering teams to improve database usage in application code, including connection lifecycle, transaction handling, retries, timeouts, pooling, query patterns, and migration workflows. • Build automation and internal tooling that makes database operations safer, more repeatable, and less dependent on manual intervention. • Define and enforce engineering standards for database access, schema design, migrations, indexing, query performance, connection management, and operational readiness. • Architect and improve database infrastructure across AWS RDS/Aurora MySQL, PostgreSQL, RDS Proxy, read replicas, backups, failover, parameter groups, monitoring, and capacity planning. • Lead database reliability initiatives that reduce operational risk, improve performance, and help Sezzle scale safely. • Review application designs and database changes early in the development lifecycle to ensure reliability, scalability, maintainability, and security are built in from the start. • Build guardrails for database migrations, including automated checks, rollback expectations, schema review workflows, migration observability, and production safety controls. • Improve developer self-service for database provisioning, access, schema management, local development, testing, and observability. • Investigate production database issues by combining application telemetry, database metrics, logs, query plans, traces, and cloud infrastructure data. • Identify and fix systemic database problems, not just symptoms — including bad access patterns, unsafe migrations, inefficient queries, connection storms, lock contention, replication lag, and capacity bottlenecks. • Create and maintain high-signal dashboards, alerts, SLOs, SLIs, runbooks, and operational readiness checks for database-backed services. • Drive improvements in database backup validation, restore testing, disaster recovery, failover readiness, and business continuity. • Work with security and compliance teams to improve database access controls, auditability, encryption, secrets management, least privilege, and PCI/SOC 2 aligned controls. • Mentor engineers on database design, query performance, safe migrations, operational readiness, and production debugging. • Use automation and AI tooling where appropriate to improve migration review, query analysis, incident investigation, documentation, and developer productivity.

🎯 Requirements

• 6+ years of professional software engineering, infrastructure engineering, database engineering, SRE, or platform engineering experience. • Strong software engineering ability in at least one production programming language such as Go, Python, or TypeScript. • Proven ability to build production-quality internal tools, libraries, frameworks, services, or platform components used by other engineers. • Deep hands-on experience with relational databases, especially MySQL and/or PostgreSQL, in high-availability production environments. • Strong understanding of how application code interacts with databases, including connection pooling, transactions, isolation levels, retries, timeouts, deadlocks, locking, migrations, and query execution. • Experience designing or improving shared database access patterns, internal database packages, ORM wrappers, migration frameworks, or developer-facing database tooling. • Hands-on experience with AWS RDS/Aurora, including provisioning, upgrades, replicas, backups, failover, monitoring, parameter tuning, and production troubleshooting. • Experience with database connection management technologies such as RDS Proxy, PgBouncer, ProxySQL, or application-level pooling. • Strong ability to analyze database performance using query plans, indexes, slow query logs, wait events, locks, metrics, and application traces. • Experience designing safe database migration processes for production systems. • Strong understanding of observability for database-backed applications, including metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, alerting, and incident response. • Experience with infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD systems such as Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Kubernetes, Helm, or similar tooling. • Ability to influence engineering teams through clear design reviews, documentation, technical standards, and practical implementation. • Ability to operate independently, identify high-impact problems, propose pragmatic solutions, and drive them to completion. • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.