Principal Database Reliability Engineer / Lead DBA, Partnerize

• If you're ready to grow your career and make a difference, we'd love to hear from you
• If you are excited by the challenge of owning a complex data estate and defining its future state, this is the role for you
• 8+ years of experience in Senior DBA, DBRE, or deeply data-focused SRE roles managing large-scale, production systems
• Expert-level relational database knowledge: Deep, hands-on experience designing, scaling, and maintaining HA environments in MySQL and PostgreSQL, including replication, clustering, and backup/restore strategies
• Infrastructure as Code & Automation: Strong proficiency in Python or Bash scripting, combined with configuration management and IaC tools (Ansible, Terraform, Helm)
• Modern Infrastructure: Solid understanding of deploying and managing services within containerised environments (Kubernetes, Docker) and navigating modern event-driven architectures (Apache Kafka)
• Linux Mastery: Advanced experience configuring, tuning, and monitoring Linux systems in physical data centres and cloud environments
• Observability: Experience building out robust monitoring and alerting for data systems to proactively catch bottlenecks
• Leadership & Autonomy: Proven ability to operate independently, prioritise workloads, and lead major technical projects from design to production

Desirable

• We are at a pivotal point in our tech progression at Partnerize, looking to scale, modernise, and future-proof our platform. At the heart of this evolution is our data layer
• We are looking for a Principal Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) to take extreme ownership of our critical database infrastructure
• Working within our Technical Operations team, you will act as the definitive Subject Matter Expert for our highly available MySQL and PostgreSQL estates, operating with a high degree of autonomy to design, build, and optimise our data tier
• This is a high-impact role where you will predominantly lead the database strategy, bridging the gap between traditional database administration and modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• You will architect resilient data systems, automate toil through Infrastructure as Code, manage our event-streaming platforms (Kafka), and empower our wider engineering teams with database best practices
• Own the Data Estate: Serve as the primary architect and technical lead for our highly available, distributed MySQL and PostgreSQL environments
• Automate Everything: Transition manual database management into code. Build, maintain, and optimize deployment pipelines for infrastructure using Terraform, Ansible, and Python
• Architect for Scale: Lead capacity planning, disaster recovery design, and high-availability architecture for both bare-metal and containerized data systems
• Manage Event Streaming: Oversee and scale our data streaming and queuing technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ) to support event-driven microservices
• Drive Performance: Proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize database performance, advising development teams on query tuning, schema design, and technical debt refactoring
• Empower the Team: Mentor wider TechOps and Engineering teams on data infrastructure best practices, creating cohesive documentation and building guardrails so the broader team can safely support the data tier
• Lead Incident Response: Act as the ultimate escalation point for complex database incidents, leading Root Cause Analysis (RCAs) and implementing permanent fixes
• Participate in On-Call: Share in the rotational on-call duties, with a specific focus on ensuring the database tier remains robust and self-healing to minimize after-hours alerts