Description

Responsibilities
● Own the availability and performance of production Apache Cassandra clusters, measured against defined service level objectives.
● Own the database lifecycle: provisioning, configuration, maintenance, major-version upgrades, scaling, and decommissioning.
● Own backup, recovery, replication, and high availability, including regular restore tests and failover drills against agreed recovery point and recovery time objectives.
● Manage capacity planning and growth of the Apache Cassandra estate.
● Build monitoring and alerting that reflects symptoms and service objectives rather than individual failures, and keep operational noise low.
● Build production-quality automation, tooling, and services that replace recurring manual procedures across the database lifecycle.
● Build standardized, supported workflows and self-service capabilities so engineering teams can provision and operate databases with less direct DBRE involvement.
● Collaborate with product-engineering teams: review data models, schema designs, and query patterns, and guide them on Apache Cassandra best practices.
● Troubleshoot complex problems that span the database, operating system, network, and application layers.
● Lead incident response for database systems, followed by blameless root-cause analysis and permanent corrective actions.
● Use AI-assisted engineering tools where they accelerate troubleshooting, automation, and documentation.
● Mentor other DBREs and review technical work.
● Maintain runbooks and documentation that others can follow and progressively automate.
● Be part of the Database Services on-call rotation and planned maintenance windows.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications
● 5+ years of experience running Apache Cassandra in large-scale production or SaaS environments.
● Solid understanding of distributed database systems internals, including replication and consistency levels, partitioning and token distribution, compaction, tombstones, and the read and write paths.
● Demonstrated production Apache Cassandra experience with:
○ Capacity planning.
○ Backup and recovery.
○ Replication, multi-datacenter topologies, and high availability.
○ Major-version upgrades.
○ Repair, compaction, and performance tuning.
○ Data modeling and partition key design, and reviewing query patterns for production impact.
○ Incident response and root-cause analysis for customer-facing production systems.
● Experience working with cross-functional engineering teams.
● Ability to participate in on-call rotations and scheduled maintenance windows.
● Fluency in English, both oral and written.
Preferred Qualifications
● Experience with:
○ Operating Apache Cassandra at scale.
○ Designing data models that avoid hotspots and unbounded partitions for high-volume workloads.
○ Zero- or near-zero-downtime operations on production clusters, including node replacement, scaling, and cross-cluster migrations.
○ Zero- or near-zero-downtime major-version upgrades of Apache Cassandra.
○ Running Apache Cassandra in Kubernetes or other containerized environments.
○ Amazon Keyspaces (managed Apache Cassandra), including data modeling, capacity configuration, and how it differs from running Cassandra yourself.
○ Amazon Aurora (managed PostgreSQL), including data modeling, capacity configuration, and how it differs from running PostgreSQL yourself.
○ YugabyteDB.
○ Linux OS fundamentals.
○ CI/CD and GitOps tools such as Jenkins and ArgoCD.
○ Infrastructure-as-code and configuration management using Ansible.
○ Building automation, tooling, or services used in production using Python.
○ Observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or OpenTelemetry

Key Skills

Education

Bachelor's degree