Staff Database Platform Engineer

About Demandbase

Demandbase is hiring a
Staff Database Platform Engineer
to lead the evolution of how we manage databases in the cloud. In addition to operating monolithic databases, you’ll build the platforms, automation, and guardrails that empower product teams to provision, run, and monitor their own databases across AWS accounts. This role is about designing the future of database reliability at scale — with automation, observability, and compliance baked in — while still being able to ‘speak DBA’ when it comes to tuning and schema design.

You’ll provide technical leadership to a global DBRE team, drive automation and best practices, and partner with engineering teams to move faster — without compromising on stability.

What You’ll Be Doing

Automation & Platform

• Build the Database Platform of the Future: Design automation and self-service frameworks for provisioning, scaling, and securing databases across AWS (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB) and other cloud-native stores.
• Develop Infrastructure-as-Code modules (Terraform, Helm, Gitlab CI/CD) to eliminate manual operations.
• Establish best practices for service-level databases in a microservices architecture (Postgres, MySQL, DynamoDB, etc.).
• Evaluate and guide architectural decisions for large-scale analytical and ETL workloads — helping the company choose the right data technologies (e.g., RDS/Aurora, BigQuery, Iceberg or other cloud-native solutions) to balance performance, cost, and scalability.
• Implement observability solutions (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenSearch) for database health at scale.

Support and Modernize Legacy Systems

• Ensure availability, performance, and security of existing large-scale monolithic databases powering critical platform functions.
• Lead efforts to reduce risk, cost, and complexity in these systems while preparing them for migration or replacement.
• Guide safe transition of workloads from shared monolithic environments toward decentralized, service-owned models.

Partner and Enable

• Collaborate with product/platform teams on schema design, query optimization, and database best practices.
• Provide tools, documentation, and onboarding support that empower teams to safely own and manage their databases.

Lead & Mentor

• Mentor DBREs to evolve from traditional DBA skillsets toward platform engineering and automation-first practices.
• Influence organizational culture toward shift-left ownership of databases.
• Participate in incident response/postmortems across both monolithic and service-owned systems.

What We’re Looking For

• 10 years of experience in database reliability, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure roles.
• Strong experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and automation (Terraform, Helm, GitLab CI/CD, Kubernetes Operators, etc.).
• Proficiency with cloud-managed relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL on RDS/Aurora) and cloud-native databases (DynamoDB).
• Proficiency with performance tuning, query optimization, and schema design.
• Experience modernizing and migrating legacy databases (including those used as ETL sources) into more scalable or fit-for-purpose systems, in partnership with data engineering/warehouse teams.
• Solid Linux skills and scripting (Python, Shell)
• Hands-on experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenSearch, or similar) and passionate about building reliable monitoring/alerting frameworks.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor DBREs/DBAs into platform engineers, and to influence engineering culture toward shift-left ownership of databases.
• Excellent communicator and collaborator — able to bridge product, platform, DBRE, and data teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience guiding organizations through monolithic-to-microservices or shared-to-service-owned database transitions.

Familiarity with big data/streaming systems (Kafka, Spark, etc.) and their intersection with service-level databases.