Senior Database Reliability Engineer

About the role

We are seeking a technically strong, hands-on Senior Database Reliability Engineer to help design, build, and scale the database platform used across Sezzle's applications . This is not a traditional DBA role . This role is for an engineer who can combine deep database knowledge with software engineering, infrastructure engineering, and platform thinking. You will help build the systems, libraries, automation, standards, and guardrails that make database usage across Sezzle reliable, secure, scalable, and easy for developers to adopt correctly. As a Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you will be responsible for improving how Sezzle applications connect to, migrate, operate, observe, and scale their databases. You will work across application teams, infrastructure, security, and engineering leadership to define patterns that improve database reliability by design - not just by operational response. You should be comfortable owning problems end-to-end: understanding application behavior, reading code, reviewing database access patterns, building shared tooling, improving connection management, designing migration safety checks, analyzing production performance, and helping developers use databases in safer and more scalable ways. You should consider yourself a DOer to be a good fit for this role. We are looking for someone who can ship production-quality engineering work , not just advise from the sidelines. With AI tooling and automation, you should be a force multiplier for database reliability, developer productivity, and operational excellence across Sezzle.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain shared database platform components used by Sezzle applications, such as database connection packages, database client libraries, migration tooling, safety checks, query standards, and developer-facing abstractions.
• Establish reliable, scalable patterns for how Sezzle services connect to and interact with relational databases across production, staging, and development environments.
• Partner with backend engineering teams to improve database usage in application code, including connection lifecycle, transaction handling, retries, timeouts, pooling, query patterns, and migration workflows.
• Build automation and internal tooling that makes database operations safer, more repeatable, and less dependent on manual intervention.
• Define and enforce engineering standards for database access, schema design, migrations, indexing, query performance, connection management, and operational readiness.
• Architect and improve database infrastructure across AWS RDS/Aurora MySQL, PostgreSQL, RDS Proxy, read replicas, backups, failover, parameter groups, monitoring, and capacity planning.
• Lead database reliability initiatives that reduce operational risk, improve performance, and help Sezzle scale safely.
• Review application designs and database changes early in the development lifecycle to ensure reliability, scalability, maintainability, and security are built in from the start.
• Build guardrails for database migrations , including automated checks, rollback expectations, schema review workflows, migration observability, and production safety controls.
• Improve developer self-service for database provisioning, access, schema management, local development, testing, and observability.
• Investigate production database issues by combining application telemetry, database metrics, logs, query plans, traces, and cloud infrastructure data.
• Identify and fix systemic database problems , not just symptoms - including bad access patterns, unsafe migrations, inefficient queries, connection storms, lock contention, replication lag, and

Benefits

Additional Information

The salary range for this role is $5,000 - $9,500 per month (Gross in USD) About Sezzle: With a mission to financially empower the next generation, Sezzle is revolutionizing the shopping experience beyond payments, blending cutting-edge tech with seamless, interest-free installment plans that make shopping smarter and more accessible. We're not just transforming payments; we're redefining how people discover, interact with, and purchase the things they love while driving real impact on merchant sales through increased conversions and higher order values. As we continue to shape the future of fintech and retail, we're building an innovative, dynamic team passionate about creating more than just a transaction but a truly unique shopping journey. If you're excited about pushing boundaries in tech and delivering a game-changing experience for consumers and merchants alike, come join us at Sezzle and help create the future of shopping!

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