Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) (PostgreSQL)

Location: Bellevue, Washington; Chicago, Illinois; New York, New York; San Francisco, California; or Washington, DC. Hybrid role with in-person onboarding and travel to the San Francisco headquarters or Chicago office during the first week. U.S. Person status is required to access federal environments and protected federal data.

Annual base salary: $160,000–$220,000 USD; an additional listed range is $143,000–$196,000 USD depending on location.

Company

Okta provides identity and access infrastructure that helps organizations securely adopt technologies including AI.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and operate highly available PostgreSQL clusters with replication, sharding, partitioning, automated failover, and disaster recovery.
• Optimize queries, indexes, schemas, storage, capacity, and workload performance across PostgreSQL and MySQL environments.
• Build automation for provisioning, configuration, backups, failovers, vacuum tuning, and schema management using Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes Operators, or custom tooling.
• Develop monitoring, alerting, and self-healing systems for database platforms.
• Lead incident response and root-cause analysis for performance regressions, replication lag, deadlocks, storage failures, and database bloat.
• Partner with SRE, Platform, and Engineering teams on SQL reviews, migrations, version upgrades, and database architecture.

Requirements

• 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 experience with MySQL, including InnoDB internals, replication, and performance tuning.
• Advanced SQL, schema design, query optimization, Linux systems, networking, and systems troubleshooting skills.
• Experience building automation with Go or Python and using monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, PMM, or pg_stat_statements.
• Hands-on AWS or GCP experience and ability to provide documentation establishing U.S. Person status.

Nice to have

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

Culture & Benefits

• In-person onboarding designed to support connection and early impact.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k), flexible spending account, paid time off, and parental leave.
• Equity and bonus opportunities where applicable.
• Programs supporting well-being, social impact, talent development, and community.

Hiring process

• In-person onboarding is required during the first week at the San Francisco or Chicago office.
• Employment onboarding requires submission of documentation confirming U.S. Person status.