Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Remote - US

At PLACE, we're building a category-defining company at the intersection of real estate, technology, business services, and the consumer. As a profitable, hypergrowth startup, on the path to an IPO, our standards are high, and our team is scrappy, and our commitment is to execute the best work of our lives.

This is YOUR CHANCE to shape the backbone of a company that's scaling rapidly and innovating boldly. As our Senior SQL Server Database Engineer, you'll partner with engineering, analytics, finance, and leadership to take ownership of a newly acquired SQL Server estate — turning it from something we merely operate into a platform that's dependable, observable, and built to grow. You'll own everything from tested backup and recovery to high availability, performance tuning, and the automation and runbooks that make the environment sustainable for the whole team. If you thrive in complexity, entrepreneurial problem-solving, and believe in scaling through tech and AI, this is your PLACE.

You're the rare engineer who is equal parts careful and ambitious. You think about what can go wrong before it does and always have a mitigation ready — but you're not content to just hold the line. You see what a platform could become and build toward it. You've spent 10+ years in production database engineering, including real operational ownership of a 24x7 environment, and you've personally executed and measured restores under pressure rather than just watched backup jobs succeed. You know SQL Server 2016+ inside and out — Always On availability groups, failover clustering, transactional replication — and you're just as comfortable in advanced T-SQL, execution plans, and indexing strategy, with the judgment to know when the real fix lives in the schema rather than the query. You've run SQL Server in AWS (RDS, RDS Custom, or EC2) and have at least one on-prem-to-cloud migration under your belt. You've managed SQL Agent jobs, automated with PowerShell and/or Python, and kept legacy SSIS packages and SSRS reports dependable. You've worked at multi-terabyte scale, and you communicate proactively — stakeholders hear about degradations from you before they have to ask.

Own availability, recoverability, and performance for all SQL Server platforms in the acquired data estate

Build and maintain a complete, documented inventory of the SQL Server estate — instances, editions, licensing, sizes, growth rates, dependencies, job schedules, and consumers

Validate the backup strategy against agreed Recovery Point Objectives; perform and report scheduled test restores that prove Recovery Time Objectives

Manage high availability (Always On, failover clustering, log shipping, transactional replication), including planned failover exercises on a published cadence

Ratify service level objectives per system tier based on measured baselines, not aspiration

Lead incident response for database-layer events — triage, mitigation, communication, and written post-incident reviews with tracked corrective actions

Own disaster recovery and contingency planning, including annual DR exercises

Administer, troubleshoot, and extend legacy SSIS packages and SSRS reports; develop new SSIS, T-SQL, and stored procedures where needed

Automate provisioning, patching, index/statistics maintenance, integrity checks, backup verification, and environment refreshes via PowerShell, T-SQL, Python, or IaC

Build platform telemetry and alerting covering data quality, job durations, wait stats, blocking/deadlocks, storage growth, and cost

Write runbooks thorough enough that another operator can run the environment in your absence

Own database-layer access reviews, encryption, key rotation, credential management, and patching currency

Act as the go-to technical authority on the SQL Server estate; participate in design reviews and flag risk early

Mentor engineers and analysts, and cross-train at least one colleague to keep the on-call rotation sustainable

Participate in a shared on-call rotation supporting a 24x7 production environment (rotation composition, on-call compensation, and maintenance windows to be confirmed)

Experience migrating or retiring legacy Microsoft BI assets (SSIS, SSRS) into a modern cloud data platform

Familiarity with AWS DMS for replication and migration

Exposure to Snowflake, dbt, or comparable modern warehouse tooling

MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Aurora experience

Azure SQL experience

Experience operating through a post-acquisition integration

Property technology, mortgage technology, or fintech domain background

Compensation: $130,000 – $150,000 base, plus equity.

We believe people do their best work when they're trusted, supported, and surrounded by others who are equally driven. That's why this role includes a "work from the PLACE you work best" approach – at home, in an office, or on the move. Our competitive benefits include PTO as needed, comprehensive insurance coverage, a 401(k) match, stock option grants, and a stock purchase plan. Every team member is an owner, building the "PLACE" they are proud to call "my company."