About the Opportunity
Our client, a top-tier financial technology provider, seeks a DevOps Database Engineer at the Assistant Vice President level to join their Platform Infrastructure team in Salt Lake City. This role drives high performance, reliability, security, and operational excellence for enterprise-scale SQL and NoSQL databases. The successful candidate will collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, platform, and security teams to build and maintain scalable, resilient, and secure data platforms supporting mission-critical applications.
Job Responsibilities
- Manage end-to-end performance of SQL and NoSQL databases, focusing on query optimization, indexing, execution plans, and tuning runtime parameters for platforms such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and DynamoDB
- Monitor and prevent performance issues using comprehensive load testing, observability tooling, and integration with CI/CD validation gates
- Advise application teams on schema design, data modeling, and workload-driven performance enhancements for relational and document-based databases
- Build and operate highly available production-grade database systems, implementing robust replication, failover, backup, restore, and security controls
- Define and execute backup and disaster recovery strategies, regularly testing restore processes and ensuring compliance with business RPO and RTO targets
- Develop and track SLIs and SLOs for database health metrics including latency, error rates, replication lag, storage consumption, and cache efficiency
- Create actionable dashboards, alerts, operational runbooks, and maintain comprehensive database documentation
- Participate in incident response and conduct post-incident reviews for database-related outages or performance issues
- Enforce database security protocols with focus on least privilege access, RBAC, auditing, encryption, secure secrets management, and access reviews
- Automate database operations and infrastructure provisioning using Infrastructure as Code tools (e.g., Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines
- Standardize configurations, schema migrations, and operational guardrails across varied database environments
Job Requirements
- Proven hands-on experience managing production SQL and NoSQL databases with strong troubleshooting and performance optimization skills
- Practical expertise with managed cloud database services including AWS RDS, Aurora PostgreSQL, MongoDB Atlas, DocumentDB, and DynamoDB
- Deep knowledge of database performance tuning, query optimization, indexing, data modeling, backup/restore procedures, scalability, and cost/performance considerations
- Demonstrated experience with observability, alerting, and monitoring for data platforms
- Automation-focused, with proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines (Gitlab), and developing operational runbooks
- Experience implementing IAM-based access controls, encryption with KMS, secrets management, and compliance-driven governance for data security
- Successful background developing and maintaining Terraform modules for database infrastructure
- Strong command of Linux fundamentals and scripting with Bash or Python
- Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes for supporting database workloads and adjacent platform services
