Senior Database Reliability Engineer

About Scribe

Scribe is where exceptional people come to do the best work of their careers. More than 94% of the Fortune 500 use Scribe to own their specialized intelligence: the unique way their teams work, decide, and get things done. Our Specialized Intelligence platform automatically captures how work happens and turns it into a living asset that helps people and AI agents do their best work.

We're growing fast, since our founding in 2019, we've grown to 7 million users across 600,000 businesses. Based in San Francisco, we've been named a LinkedIn Top Startup, are valued at over $1 billion, and are backed by leading investors. Join us in our mission to transform how people do work.

📌 About the Role

We're hiring a Senior Database Reliability Engineer to own the reliability, performance, and scalability of Scribe's data tier. Our engineering org is doubling — which means the guardrails, automation, and standards you put in place today will carry a much larger team through the next phase of growth. This is a senior IC role with real ownership: you'll set the bar for how engineers across the company interact with our databases, not just keep the lights on.

Our stack is Django on PostgreSQL (Aurora Serverless V2), OpenSearch, Redis (ElastiCache), SQS, and RabbitMQ, with a CDC pipeline running Aurora to DMS to S3 Parquet to Snowflake. Engineers ship through the ORM, not raw SQL — which makes migration safety, index design, and query review genuinely high-stakes work.

🛠️ What You'll Do

Own database reliability across Aurora, OpenSearch, Redis, and our CDC pipeline — including schema design reviews, migration safety (locks, backfills, concurrent index builds, NOT VALID constraints), and incident response for the data tier

Make the Django ORM a strength at scale: catch N+1 patterns in review, extend QuerySet conventions and physical schema standards, and build the CI checks and AGENTS.md scaffolding that encode those standards so they scale beyond any single reviewer

Operate and evolve the CDC pipeline from Aurora through DMS to S3 Parquet to Snowflake – including replication slot hygiene, schema evolution safety, and automated checks that catch migrations likely to break downstream consumers before they ship

Build and improve observability across pganalyze, CloudWatch, and Honeycomb, with Django-side instrumentation that ties slow ORM queries back to specific users, flags, and deploys

Drive multi-AZ resilience within our single-region architecture — Aurora writer/reader placement, failover behavior, RTO/RPO, ElastiCache and OpenSearch AZ topology, RabbitMQ survivability

Build self-service tooling and dashboards that give product and platform teams visibility into their own query footprint, reducing the review burden as the engineering org grows

Contribute to onboarding and knowledge-sharing as a large incoming class of engineers joins — write docs, run internal sessions on "what your ORM query is really doing," and feed that knowledge back into AI review tooling

🔍 What We're Looking For

Deep PostgreSQL expertise in practice: read EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) fluently, understand MVCC, bloat, lock contention, and vacuum behavior, and tune Aurora Serverless V2 for latency and throughput

Work with an ORM (Django, SQLAlchemy, ActiveRecord, or similar) at production scale – predict the SQL a query generates, spot N+1 issues on sight, and know when joins beat batched IN queries and when they don't

Run CDC pipelines in production, ideally with AWS DMS — comfort with logical replication, slot hygiene, schema evolution, and Parquet-based data lakes feeding Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift

Hands-on experience with pganalyze (or Datadog DBM / pg_stat_statements pipelines), CloudWatch, and Honeycomb (or another high-cardinality tracing tool); comfortable with OpenTelemetry

Work with OpenSearch, Redis, and at least one production message broker (SQS, RabbitMQ, or Kafka) at scale

Write real automation — Python, Go, or similar — and use Terraform or comparable IaC to manage infrastructure

Use AI coding and review tools in a team setting: write and maintained AGENTS.md files, configure review agents, iterate on prompts

✨ Nice to Have

Event sourcing on Postgres, or experience with alternate CDC tooling (Debezium, Fivetran, Airbyte)

pgbouncer or RDS Proxy at scale with Django connection handling

Deep Honeycomb usage: SLOs, BubbleUp, Triggers, derived columns

Snowflake from the producer side: staging, Snowpipe, external tables on Parquet

Experience scaling data infrastructure through rapid engineering headcount growth

SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, or similar compliance work

📍 Location

San Francisco (hybrid, 3 days per week in-office) or , Remote based permanently in PST (Pacific Standard Time).

💰 Compensation

Salary varies by location. All full-time employees receive equity in Scribe. Final offers depend on experience and scope.

🎁 Benefits

Health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents

Flexible paid time off and company holidays

401(k)

Paid parental leave

Daily catered lunch (SF office)

Commuter benefits

Home office stipend

At Scribe, we celebrate our differences and are committed to creating a workplace where all employees feel supported and empowered to do their best work. Scribe is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.