Lead Database Reliability Engineer

Role Description

The Impact of a Lead Database Reliability Engineer at Coupa:

As a Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you will focus primarily on Cloud based SQL Server environments. You will be responsible for designing, automating, and maintaining reliable database infrastructure that supports mission-critical applications.

As a senior member of the team, you’ll be a hands-on technical leader—driving automation, mentoring engineers, and partnering with development and infrastructure teams to deliver resilient, secure, and performant data platforms.

What You’ll Do

• Lead database architecture and design initiatives, delivering scalable, high-performance, reliable solutions aligned with business needs and long-term strategic goals.
• Leverage AI/ML technologies to improve database operations through performance optimization, capacity planning, anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and automation.
• Develop, maintain, and enhance database monitoring, alerting, backup, and disaster recovery systems to ensure system health, data integrity, and high availability.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex database issues, providing technical leadership, guidance, and operational support, including participation in on-call rotations.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and internal policies by conducting regular database audits, assessments, and governance reviews.
• Collaborate effectively across cross-functional teams, mentor junior database engineers, stay current on emerging database technologies and best practices, and remain flexible to support global teams across multiple time zones.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Engineering, Science, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience) with 8+ years of hands-on database administration, management, and performance optimization experience.
• Deep expertise in MySQL, including database design, implementation, configuration, security, troubleshooting, maintenance, backup/recovery, replication, and performance tuning.
• Strong automation and cloud experience, including scripting with Bash, Python, or Ruby and managing large-scale AWS environments, with knowledge of cloud-native database services such as RDS and Aurora; Azure or GCP experience is a plus.
• Experience building and maintaining database observability solutions, including monitoring, dashboards, and alerting using tools such as PMM, New Relic, VividCortex, or similar database management platforms.
• Expertise in high-availability and disaster recovery solutions, including failover clustering, Orchestrator, and strategies that ensure database reliability, resilience, and business continuity.
• Preferred qualifications include experience with PostgreSQL or MongoDB, configuration management tools (Chef/Puppet), Terraform, GitHub-based workflows, and relevant database administration or automation certifications.

Requirements

• $142,000 - $198,667 a year
• The successful candidate’s starting salary will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location.

Benefits

• Coupa complies with relevant laws and regulations regarding equal opportunity and offers a welcoming and inclusive work environment.
• Decisions related to hiring, compensation, training, or evaluating performance are made fairly, and we provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified candidates and employees.