Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE)

Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE)

Okta is seeking a hands-on database reliability engineer with deep PostgreSQL expertise and production MySQL experience to design, operationalize, and optimize the persistence layer supporting large-scale, mission-critical systems. Work closely with SRE, Platform, and Engineering teams to improve performance, reliability, automation, and operational excellence. This role focuses on building resilient data infrastructure, not just administering it.

Locations and Work Arrangement

• Hybrid position listed in Bellevue, WA; Chicago, IL; New York, NY; San Francisco, CA; and Washington, DC.
• Requires in-person onboarding and travel to the San Francisco headquarters or Chicago office during the first week of employment.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate highly available PostgreSQL clusters using physical and logical replication, sharding/partitioning, and automated failover.
• Optimize query performance, indexing, schema design, and storage engines.
• Perform capacity planning, growth forecasting, and workload modeling.
• Own high-availability strategies, including automatic failover, multi-AZ/multi-region deployments, and disaster recovery.
• Automate provisioning, configuration, backups, failovers, vacuum tuning, and schema management using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes Operators, or custom tooling.
• Build monitoring, alerting, and self-healing systems for PostgreSQL and MySQL.
• Lead database incident response, conduct root-cause analysis, and implement permanent fixes.
• Partner with software engineers to review SQL, optimize schemas, and use PostgreSQL features efficiently.
• Provide guidance on database design patterns, migrations, version upgrades, and best practices.

Required Qualifications

• At least 4 years of hands-on PostgreSQL experience in high-volume, distributed, or large-scale production environments.
• Strong knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, including WAL, MVCC, bloat/vacuum tuning, query planning, indexing, and logical replication.
• Production MySQL experience, including InnoDB internals, replication, and performance tuning.
• Advanced SQL and strong understanding of schema design and query optimization.
• Experience with Linux systems, networking fundamentals, and systems troubleshooting.
• Experience building automation with Go or Python.
• Production experience with monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, PMM, or pg_stat_statements.
• Hands-on cloud experience with AWS or GCP.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with PgBouncer, HAProxy, or other connection-pooling/load-balancing layers.
• Exposure to event streaming using Kafka or Debezium and change data capture.
• Experience supporting 24/7 production environments with an on-call rotation.
• Contributions to the open-source PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Employment Conditions and Application Notices

• This position requires access to federal environments and/or protected federal data. Upon hire, the successful candidate must provide documentation establishing U.S. Person status, such as U.S. Citizen, National, Lawful Permanent Resident, Refugee, or Asylee, under 22 CFR 120.15.
• Reasonable accommodations for the application, interview, or onboarding process may be requested through the posting's accommodation form.
• Okta may use automated employment decision tools in recruitment and hiring. New York City applicants and employees should review the linked NYC AEDT notice.

Compensation and Benefits

• San Francisco Bay Area annual base salary: $160,000–$220,000 USD.
• California outside the Bay Area, Colorado, Illinois, New York, and Washington annual base salary: $143,000–$196,000 USD.
• Actual base salary depends on skills, qualifications, experience, and work location.
• Equity where applicable, bonus, health, dental and vision insurance, 401(k), flexible spending account, PTO, and parental leave are offered in accordance with applicable plans and policies.