Sr. Database Reliability Engineer II

Title: Sr. Database Reliability Engineer II Location: Chicago or Remote*

What you'll do:

As a Sr. Database Reliability  Engineer II, you will help architect, evolve, and optimize the data platform powering NinjaTrader's core trading applications. This is not a traditional Database Administrator (DBA) role. We're looking for a software engineer with deep MySQL/Postgres expertise who enjoys solving complex data challenges while remaining actively involved in software development.

You'll partner closely with software engineers, architects, and platform teams to improve database performance, evolve our data architecture, build developer tooling, and establish engineering best practices that enable our platform to continue scaling. You'll play a key role in shaping the future direction of our data platform by driving initiatives that improve scalability, resiliency, developer productivity, and operational excellence.

This role is ideal for someone who has spent their career building production software and naturally became the database expert responsible for solving performance bottlenecks, designing scalable schemas, and improving application reliability.

In this role you will:

• Design and evolve MySQL schemas supporting high-volume transactional workloads
• Define and drive improvements to NinjaTrader's data platform architecture, including online schema changes, zero/low-downtime database migrations, blue/green deployments, and scalability initiatives that support long-term platform growth.
• Analyze and optimize SQL queries, indexes, and execution plans to improve application performance
• Develop production-quality software that improves our persistence layer, developer tooling, and data platform capabilities
• Design scalable data models that balance performance, maintainability, and long-term growth
• Build reusable libraries, frameworks, and tooling that simplify data access and improve developer productivity across engineering teams
• Lead database performance tuning initiatives across applications and services
• Drive modernization initiatives for database architecture, deployment processes, and operational reliability
• Design and implement safe, repeatable database migration strategies supporting continuous delivery
• Investigate and resolve complex production issues involving application performance, database behavior, locking, concurrency, and data integrity
• Establish engineering standards and best practices for schema design, indexing, SQL development, database migrations, and data access patterns
• Partner with Platform Engineering to improve database monitoring, backup strategies, disaster recovery, and operational resilience
• Leverage Google Cloud Platform services, including Cloud SQL, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, and related tooling, to improve the reliability, scalability, and observability of our data platform
• Mentor engineers on data modeling, SQL optimization, MySQL best practices, and application performance optimization
• Lead technical design discussions and architecture reviews related to database-backed applications
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend solutions that improve platform scalability, maintainability, and engineering efficiency
• Serve as a technical leader and trusted advisor for database architecture, application performance, and data platform best practices

What you'll need:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong experience building backend applications using Java, C#, Go, Python, Kotlin, Scala, or similar modern programming languages
• Expert-level experience with MySQL in large-scale production environments
• Deep understanding of:
  • SQL optimization
  • Query execution plans
  • Indexing strategies
  • Transactions and isolation levels
  • Locking and concurrency
  • Schema design and normalization
  • Replication and high availability
• Experience designing scalable database schemas for high-volume transactional applications
• Experience troubleshooting complex application and database performance issues
• Experience implementing database migration strategies supporting continuous delivery
• Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, and engineering best practices
• Experience leading technical initiatives and influencing architectural decisions across engineering teams
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineers and cross-functional stakeholders
• Passion for improving developer productivity by building automation, developer tooling, database testing frameworks, performance benchmarking harnesses, and engineering best practices.

Bonus points for:

• Experience building and operating applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Experience with Cloud SQL for MySQL
• Experience using Google Cloud services such as Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Secret Manager, Cloud Build, or Cloud Deploy
• Experience supporting financial services, trading platforms, or other high-throughput transactional systems
• Experience working in startup or high-growth engineering environments where engineers owned both application development and database performance
• Experience improving developer productivity through tooling and automation
• Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems
• Experience implementing observability solutions, performance monitoring, and database telemetry
• Experience leveraging AI/ML tools or technologies to improve software development, operational efficiency, or engineering productivity

Compensation:

The salary range for this role will be $130,000.00 - $180,000.00 USD. In addition, this position will also receive an annual target bonus of 10%. Bonus pay at NinjaTrader is based on individual performance (50%) as well as company/team performance (50%).

Salary and bonus earnings are only two components of the total compensation package offered by NinjaTrader. NinjaTrader offers a 401K plan through ADP under which the company will match up to 3.5% of employee contributions. Annual paid time off allowance accrues at a rate of 18 days per year plus seven paid holidays.

All offered compensation will be based on assessed experience and is subject to change at the offer stage.

Location:

This role is based in Chicago, IL. *There may be remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in the following states: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, Wisconsin.

Hybrid:

For Chicago-based employees, we follow a hybrid work schedule: In-office Tuesday through Thursday, with remote work on Mondays and Fridays. In addition to these weekly remote days, we offer:

• 20 additional flex remote days annually
• 5 Company Wide Office-Optional weeks tied to major holidays