Senior Database Reliability Engineer

About Sezzle:

With a mission to financially empower the next generation, Sezzle is revolutionizing the shopping experience beyond payments, blending cutting-edge tech with seamless, interest-free installment plans that make shopping smarter and more accessible. We’re not just transforming payments; we’re redefining how people discover, interact with, and purchase the things they love while driving real impact on merchant sales through increased conversions and higher order values. As we continue to shape the future of fintech and retail, we’re building an innovative, dynamic team passionate about creating more than just a transaction but a truly unique shopping journey. If you’re excited about pushing boundaries in tech and delivering a game-changing experience for consumers and merchants alike, come join us at Sezzle and help create the future of shopping!

About the Role: 

We are seeking a technically strong, hands-on Senior Database Reliability Engineer to help design, build, and scale the database platform used across Sezzle’s applications.

This is not a traditional DBA role. This role is for an engineer who can combine deep database knowledge with software engineering, infrastructure engineering, and platform thinking. You will help build the systems, libraries, automation, standards, and guardrails that make database usage across Sezzle reliable, secure, scalable, and easy for developers to adopt correctly.

As a Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you will be responsible for improving how Sezzle applications connect to, migrate, operate, observe, and scale their databases. You will work across application teams, infrastructure, security, and engineering leadership to define patterns that improve database reliability by design — not just by operational response.

You should be comfortable owning problems end-to-end: understanding application behavior, reading code, reviewing database access patterns, building shared tooling, improving connection management, designing migration safety checks, analyzing production performance, and helping developers use databases in safer and more scalable ways.

You should consider yourself a DOer to be a good fit for this role. We are looking for someone who can ship production-quality engineering work, not just advise from the sidelines. With AI tooling and automation, you should be a force multiplier for database reliability, developer productivity, and operational excellence across Sezzle.

Compensation:

For this senior development role, with 6+ years of experience, the compensation range is  $5,000 - $9,500 USD per month. This range acknowledges the extensive expertise, leadership capabilities, and significant contributions expected at this level, offering a competitive salary to reflect the value of advanced skills and experience.

What You'll Do:

• 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.

What We look for: 

• 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.
• Demonstrated experience working with Claude or equivalent large language model tools is required; candidates must be comfortable leveraging AI to enhance productivity, research, and communication.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

Preferred Knowledge and Skills:

• Experience building platform capabilities for a microservices environment.
• Experience with Golang application development and database access patterns.
• Experience creating database libraries, SDKs, service templates, migration frameworks, or paved-road developer tooling.
• Experience improving database reliability across many services or teams, not just one application.
• Experience with fintech, payments, banking, e-commerce, or other high-volume transactional systems.
• Experience with compliance-sensitive environments such as PCI DSS, SOC 2, or SOX.
• Experience with database access governance, audit logging, secrets management, encryption, IAM authentication, and least-privilege access models.
• Experience with large-scale operational automation for provisioning, patching, failover testing, backup validation, access management, or schema review.
• Experience with distributed systems patterns such as transactional outbox, event-driven architecture, idempotency, queues, eventual consistency, and data consistency tradeoffs.
• Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, Performance Insights, OpenTelemetry, or New Relic.
• Familiarity with Elasticsearch or other supporting data stores.
• Familiarity with AI developer tooling such as Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, Cursor, and using it to be a more productive engineer.

About You: 

• You have relentlessly high standards - many people may think your standards are unreasonably high. You are continually raising the bar and driving those around you to deliver great results. You make sure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.
• You’re not bound by convention - your success—and much of the fun—lies in developing new ways to do things
• You need action - speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking.
• You earn trust - you listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully.
• You have backbone; disagree, then commit - you can respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. You have conviction and are tenacious. You do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, you commit wholly.
• You deliver results - you focus on the key inputs and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, you rise to the occasion and never settle.

Sezzle’s Technology Stack:

• Languages: Golang, Typescript, Python
• Frontend: Typescript - React and React Native
• Backend: Golang
• Database: MySQL, Postgres, Elasticsearch
• DevOps & Cloud: AWS, Kubernetes
• Version Control: Git
• CI/CD: Gitlab
• Testing: Developer and AI-driven, focus on automated end-to-end, integration, and unit tests
• Open Source: Sezzle is focused on using open source, and we build what we can before buying!

What Makes Working at Sezzle Awesome? 

At Sezzle, we are more than just brilliant engineers, passionate data enthusiasts, out-of-the-box thinkers, and determined innovators; we are skilled musicians, yogis, cyclists, chefs, golfers, dog-lovers, and rock-climbers. We believe in surrounding ourselves with not only the best and the brightest individuals, but those that are unique and purpose-driven in all that they do. Our culture is not defined by a certain set of perks designed to give the illusion of the traditional startup culture, but rather, it is the visible example living in every employee that we hire.