Senior Database Reliability Engineer I - Germany/Austria/UK
Storyblok, Remote
The role
You will own the reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of the PostgreSQL data platform behind our flagship CMS — primarily Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL — along with the infrastructure and automation around it.
This is a reliability engineering role, not a classic administration one. Aurora takes care of patching, backups, failover, and storage growth; you own what it does not — query and index strategy, plan regressions across major version upgrades, vacuum and bloat, connection management, zero-downtime schema change, logical replication, and capacity and cost modeling. Alongside this, you work as a full member of the Infrastructure team on Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and security tooling, and you share the on-call rotation.
You will work in a shared-ownership model: backend teams own their queries and schemas, and you own the platform, guardrails, tooling, and knowledge-sharing that make their decisions safe. You will collaborate closely with backend engineers, DevOps engineers, Security, product owners, and the Data team.
We measure success by the reliability and predictable performance of the data platform, the quality of your incident response, and how well other engineering teams are equipped to make sound database decisions without you in the room.
What you need
Required — PostgreSQL depth
- 7+ years in database engineering, database reliability, infrastructure, or SRE roles, including significant hands-on ownership of production PostgreSQL.
- Deep PostgreSQL expertise: internals and MVCC, reading and acting on EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS), indexing strategy, vacuum behavior, locking, connection pooling, and configuration tuning.
- Strong experience with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and AWS-managed database services.
- Proven track record of zero-downtime upgrades and complex schema migrations on large, busy tables.
- Hands-on experience with physical and logical replication, partitioning, read scaling, and designing and validating backup and disaster-recovery strategies.
Required — Infrastructure and ways of working
- Solid experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, primarily Terraform, on AWS.
- Strong Linux fundamentals plus fluency in at least one scripting language (Bash, Python, Ruby, or Go) for automation and tooling.
- Experience with monitoring and observability tooling, and a solid grasp of security practices (IAM, secrets management, network segmentation).
- Experience with change, incident, and problem management in production, and with Git and modern CI/CD workflows applied to database changes.
- Strong written and verbal communication in a remote-first organization, including the ability to explain database trade-offs to backend engineers and non-specialists.