Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Role Description

As a Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you will ensure the availability, reliability, performance, and security of enterprise database systems supporting Credit Acceptance applications. This role focuses on reducing operational toil through automation, enabling secure, scalable database platforms, and empowering engineering teams through self-service capabilities and DevOps integration.

You will partner with application, infrastructure, and data teams to build and operate modern database platforms, support data replication and migration initiatives, and drive continuous improvements in reliability and efficiency.

This position will work from home; occasional planned travel to an assigned Southfield, Michigan office location may be required. However, this position is permitted to work at a Southfield, Michigan office location if requested by the team member.

Outcome and Activities

• Platform Engineering & Automation
  • Design and implement automated database provisioning and configuration management
  • Develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions (e.g., Terraform, Ansible)
  • Build self-service database capabilities and platform APIs
  • Implement event-driven automation and auto-remediation workflows
  • Establish policy-driven guardrails for database configuration, access, and compliance
  • Integrate database services into CI/CD pipelines and release workflows
• Reliability, Availability & Resilience
  • Define and manage Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
  • Design and maintain high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) architectures
  • Perform failover testing and resilience validation
  • Lead incident response, root cause analysis (RCA), and post-incident reviews
  • Drive improvements in MTTD and MTTR
• Performance & Scalability Engineering
  • Monitor and optimize database performance, query efficiency, and throughput
  • Identify and resolve application-database performance bottlenecks
  • Design for scalability and workload isolation (replicas, partitioning, sharding)
  • Conduct capacity planning and forecasting
  • Optimize cost-performance efficiency in cloud environments
• Observability & Monitoring
  • Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks
  • Define and track database golden signals (latency, errors, throughput, saturation)
  • Build dashboards for health, performance, and capacity trends
  • Integrate telemetry into central observability platforms
  • Develop proactive alerting and anomaly detection
• Data Replication & Migration
  • Design and manage replication strategies (logical, physical, CDC)
  • Implement and operate AWS DMS or equivalent tools
  • Enable near real-time data movement across systems
  • Troubleshoot replication lag and data consistency issues
  • Support large-scale database migrations (e.g., Oracle → PostgreSQL/Aurora)
• Security & Access Control
  • Implement least privilege, role-based access controls
  • Enable Just-In-Time (JIT) access using PAM solutions (e.g., CyberArk)
  • Enforce secure access patterns and eliminate direct production DB access
  • Manage credentials using centralized secrets management
  • Ensure adherence to audit, compliance, and governance requirements
  • Support encryption standards (in transit and at rest)
• Database & Data Access Engineering
  • Support data modeling, indexing, partitioning, and schema optimization
  • Demonstrate familiarity with modern database access technologies:
  • ORM frameworks (Hibernate, JPA, SQLAlchemy)
  • JDBC and connection management best practices
  • GraphQL and API-driven data access patterns
  • Design and promote Data Access Layer (DAL) architectures
  • Optimize data access patterns to improve performance and scalability
• Developer Enablement & DevOps Integration
  • Manage database schema lifecycle using version-controlled tools (Liquibase/Flyway)
  • Enable automated deployments and zero-downtime database changes
  • Implement testing strategies for database changes
  • Partner with engineering teams to improve database usage patterns
  • Provide guidance on best practices, ORM usage, and performance tuning
  • Promote shift-left adoption of database design and reliability practices
• Cloud Database Operations
  • Manage and support cloud database platforms, including:
  • AWS RDS / Aurora (PostgreSQL preferred)
  • DynamoDB
  • Oracle
  • SQL Server
  • MongoDB
  • MySQL
• Other Responsibilities
  • Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
• 7+ years in database engineering / DBA / DBRE roles
• Strong experience in SQL, performance tuning, HA, backup, and recovery

Preferred

• AWS RDS / Aurora PostgreSQL experience
• AWS DMS / CDC / replication experience
• Observability tools (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
• DevOps tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
• Python / shell scripting / REST APIs
• JIT / PAM (CyberArk) experience
• Data lake / warehouse / lakehouse exposure
• Distributed systems / microservices experience
• Linux/Unix expertise

Target Compensation

A competitive base salary range from $104,081 – $152,652. This position is eligible for an annual variable cash bonus, between 7.5 - 15%. Bonus amounts are based on individual performance. Final compensation within the range is influenced by many factors including role-specific skills, depth and experience level, industry background, relevant education and certifications.

Candidates who reside in the following major metropolitan areas may be eligible for a premium on top of the posted range based on their specific zone: San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Benefits

• Excellent benefits package that includes 401(K) match, adoption assistance, parental leave, tuition reimbursement, comprehensive medical/dental/vision and many nonstandard benefits that make us a Great Place to Work

Company Values

• Positive by maintaining resiliency and focusing on solutions
• Respectful by collaborating and actively listening
• Insightful by cultivating innovation, accumulating business and role specific knowledge, demonstrating self-awareness and making quality decisions
• Direct by effectively communicating and conveying courage
• Earnest by taking accountability, applying feedback and effectively planning and priority setting

Expectations

• Remain compliant with our policies processes and legal guidelines
• All other duties as assigned
• Attendance as required by department