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 or Chicago office during the first week.

Salary: $160,000–$220,000 USD annual base salary; another listed range is $143,000–$196,000 USD depending on location.

Company

Okta builds identity and access security infrastructure for organizations and AI applications.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and operate highly available PostgreSQL clusters with replication, sharding, partitioning, automated failover, and disaster recovery.
• Optimize query performance, indexing, schema design, storage, capacity, and workload models across PostgreSQL and MySQL.
• 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 environments.
• Lead incident response and root-cause analysis for performance regressions, replication lag, deadlocks, bloat, and storage failures.
• Partner with software engineers on SQL, migrations, version upgrades, database design patterns, and PostgreSQL best practices.

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 fundamentals, and systems troubleshooting.
• Experience building automation with Go or Python and using monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, PMM, or pg_stat_statements.
• Must be able to submit documentation establishing U.S. Person status to access federal environments or protected federal data. Hands-on AWS or GCP experience is also required.

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 an on-call rotation.
• Contributions to the open-source PostgreSQL ecosystem.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work with an immersive in-person onboarding experience.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k), flexible spending account, paid time off, and parental leave.
• Equity and bonus opportunities where applicable.
• Opportunities for talent development, community connection, and social impact.