Staff Database Reliability Engineer

About the role We're hiring a Staff Database Reliability Engineer to own the strategy, architecture, and operational excellence of our data infrastructure. This is an expert-level IC role with deep influence on engineering direction, partnering closely with platform, backend, and DevOps engineers. Why this role matters You will own the data tier end-to-end. Design schemas and access patterns that scale, tune Aurora for latency and throughput, and set the standards for how engineers interact with our databases. When a migration script seizes up mid-deploy and writes start queueing behind an ACCESS EXCLUSIVE lock, your runbooks and automation resolve the incident quickly. Make the Django ORM a strength, not a liability: Review migrations for safety at scale — locks, backfills, concurrent index builds, NOT VALID constraints Catch N+1 patterns and missing select_related / prefetch_related in review Establish conventions for QuerySet usage and physical schema design (indexes, constraints, partitioning) Scale review through automation, not heroics — author AGENTS.md files and DNA scaffolding that encode our conventions, configure AI review bots (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to flag risky m