Database Performance Engineer

We are seeking a highly experienced Database Performance Engineer / DBA specializing in Performance and Load Testing to optimize, benchmark, and scale mission-critical, high-volume transactional database systems. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in MariaDB and MySQL performance tuning, workload analysis, distributed load testing, database observability, and scalability engineering.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead database performance, load, stress, endurance, and scalability testing for high-volume transactional platforms.
• Design, execute, and analyze performance tests using tools such as k6, Locust, Gatling, or equivalent frameworks.
• Administer, troubleshoot, and optimize MariaDB and MySQL database environments.
• Analyze and tune SQL queries, indexes, execution plans, schemas, and database configurations.
• Identify and resolve slow queries, lock contention, deadlocks, connection saturation, and replication lag.
• Monitor database performance metrics, including CPU, memory, IOPS, query latency, transaction throughput, and buffer pool efficiency.
• Support distributed load generation and production-scale workload simulations.
• Develop database scalability strategies involving read replicas, partitioning, sharding, schema separation, and resource scaling.
• Implement and maintain observability dashboards, monitoring, and alerting using Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry.
• Perform root cause analysis of database and application performance issues in collaboration with Software, QA, Infrastructure, and Performance Engineering teams.
• Establish performance baselines, capacity plans, benchmarks, and database reliability standards.
• Prepare detailed performance reports and recommend remediation strategies to improve system efficiency and resilience.
• Support cloud-native and Kubernetes-based database environments.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor team members, and promote database performance engineering best practices.

Mandatory Technical Skills

• 7+ years of experience in database administration, with a strong focus on performance engineering.
• Extensive hands-on experience with MariaDB and MySQL administration and performance tuning.
• Proven experience in database-focused performance and load testing.
• Strong knowledge of k6, Locust, Gatling, or comparable load-testing tools.
• Experience with distributed load generation and large-scale workload simulation.
• Expertise in SQL optimization, indexing, execution plan analysis, schema tuning, and query performance.
• Strong understanding of lock contention, deadlocks, replication optimization, and replication-lag analysis.
• Experience monitoring database saturation, connection pools, IOPS, CPU, memory, and transaction throughput.
• Knowledge of database scalability strategies, including read replicas, partitioning, sharding, and horizontal and vertical scaling.
• Hands-on experience with observability platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry.
• Strong Linux administration and scripting/automation skills.
• Experience working with cloud-native infrastructure and Kubernetes-based environments.