Staff Database Reliability Engineer, Checkr
$165-229k
Salary dependent on candidates location
3+ days a week in office
Automated background checks
Posted today
Automated background checks
1001+ employees
Posted today
$165-229k
Salary dependent on candidates location
3+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To build a fairer future by designing technology to create opportunities for all.
Role
Who you are
- A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
- 10+ years of experience designing, administering, and scaling relational and non-relational database storage architectures in production environments
- Deep expertise managing and tuning MongoDB and PostgreSQL or MySQL database topologies at high volume and scale
- Understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including data structures and software design principles, and the ability to apply them to solve technical challenges
- Extensive hands-on experience with AWS database and storage ecosystems, including RDS, Aurora, ElastiCache, MongoDB Atlas, and S3
- Demonstrated track record of automating cloud infrastructure and database operations using Terraform, Terragrunt, and modern scripting languages
- Strong technical leadership skills with a proven ability to guide engineering teams through database schema design, zero-downtime migrations (e.g., gh-ost), and security compliance standards
- An A-player mindset with a strong bias for action: you raise the bar, move with urgency, stay resilient through ambiguity, and take ownership to deliver meaningful outcomes
What the job involves
- Reporting to the Manager, DevOps Engineering, you will lead the architecture, reliability, and operational excellence of Checkr’s core data stores. Checkr offers fantastic AI enablement, and you'll use AI tooling throughout your day-to-day. In this role, you will own database capacity planning, financial forecasting, high availability, disaster recovery, and infrastructure-as-code automation across high-scale distributed data stores. Partnering closely with Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Core Services, and Product Engineering teams, you will establish fleet-wide data governance and performance standards that power Checkr's continuous platform growth
- Lead and execute the architectural design, high availability strategies including multi-region, and business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions across Checkr’s multi-cloud database fleet
- Inspire and drive high standards across the team by mentoring and growing engineers
- Drive the long-term vision and strategy of database architecture at Checkr; communicate that strategy in a way that resonates with engineers and upper leadership, and propose projects that move the company towards that vision
- Ensure the security of highly sensitive data through encryption and security-first architecture
- Provision, scale, and maintain cloud database systems across production, staging, and sandbox environments using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Terragrunt)
- Optimize database performance at the query, schema, connection, and instance levels across PostgreSQL or MySQL, and MongoDB workloads
- Partner with Site Reliability Engineering to build proactive observability, automated alerting, and diagnostic tooling for database health and performance metrics
- Automate operational toil, maintenance workflows, schema migrations, and backup lifecycle policies to improve reliability and engineering velocity
- Lead incident diagnosis, resolution, and post-incident reviews for critical database alerts and outages across customer-serving infrastructure
Our take
Checkr addresses the unpleasant and time consuming process of background checks so that companies using on-demand employees can make safer, more informed hiring decisions in less time. Background checks are a critical part of the hiring process, and CEO Daniel Yannisse noticed that they were painfully slow, resulting in loss of work for candidates and productivity downturns for employers.
Before Checkr entered the market in 2014 with its innovative AI technology and a solid $50m in venture capital funding, companies were waiting upwards of two weeks for their checks. Checkr substantially reduces this time frame and has grown to receive a $5 billion valuation.
Checkr has accelerated growth by making several highly advantageous acquisitions of competitor companies, GoodHire and Inflection. As the world of work embraces diversity and inclusion, the company announced an end-to-end service for candidates wishing to expunge their criminal records, furthering the company’s ‘fair chance’ mission and clearing 1000s of candidates for free since 2021. New products launched at the end of 2023 include Checkr Pay (providing access to payment right after a shift) and Checkr Onboard (unified onboarding processes), exemplifying how Checkr is keeping pace with a rapidly changing, flexible, and mobile-first workforce.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
18% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Sep 2021
$250m
SERIES E
Sep 2019
$160m
SERIES D
Total funding: $552.2m
Company benefits
- Parental leave
- Stock optoins
- Work from home opportunities
- Comprehensive Health Plans | We cover 100% of insurance premiums and offer generous parental and family leave
- Competitive Compensation | We offer competitive salaries and meaningful equity
- A Variety of Food and Snacks | Our culinary team serves a rotating menu for lunch each day, along with unlimited snacks and drinks
- Wellness Programs | We invest in the holistic well-being of every team member through education reimbursements, onsite massages, and physical therapy
- Flexible Paid Time Off | We want you to take the time you need to relax and recharge
- Fitness and Public Transport Reimbursement | We’ll cover your commute and help you stay active with our onsite gym or fitness provider of choice
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Jonathan Perichon
(Co-Founder)After an MSc in Computer Science, Jonathan worked as a Software Engineer at Mogreet and deliv for a combined year and a half. He co-founded Checkr in May 2014, serving as CTO since.
Daniel Yanisse
(Co-Founder & CEO)Daniel worked as a Software Engineer at Mogreet and Deliv before co-founding Checkr.
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