Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Database reliability sits at the core of SaaS platforms where customer experience is directly shaped by data availability, latency, and safe change management. This Database Reliability Engineer IV role stands out because it concentrates on the shared data layer across storage and streaming systems, including Kafka and AWS, with an explicit mandate to create standards and tooling that make database operations more consistent across engineering.
From a SaaS career perspective, the work builds durable expertise in operating cloud-native data services under real production constraints, including observability, lifecycle ownership, and incident response. The emphasis on automation and self-service tooling is especially transferable across modern SaaS organisations, where reducing operational friction for product teams is a key lever for reliability and delivery speed. Exposure to Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and streaming pipelines also broadens the scope beyond traditional database administration into platform engineering.
This role is best suited to engineers who prefer systems thinking and pragmatic engineering over ad hoc firefighting, and who enjoy partnering with stakeholders to define guardrails that scale. It will fit someone comfortable balancing deep technical work with organisation-wide enablement, and who is prepared for the operational responsibility that comes with on-call in a high-scale environment.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
PagerDuty is seeking a proficient Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) IV to enhance our dynamic, customer-centric team! In this role as a DBRE, you will develop standards and practices for our back-end data storage, and data streaming systems. You will also build tools to enable engineers to easily interact with and optimize their database systems. This role offers a thrilling opportunity to contribute to scaling the PagerDuty Platform. The perfect candidate will come with coding/scripting abilities, Kafka expertise, experience with AWS, and a solid background in Site Reliability Engineering or DBRE in high-scale environments. If you have a track record of solving complex problems with automation and a keen interest in making database systems more approachable to others, then you’re the ideal candidate.
Key Responsibilities
- You partner with Engineering stakeholders to design and deliver reliable, scalable, secure, and performant data platforms.
- You continuously strive to improve the customer experience: Full lifecycle support (creation, development, deployment, retirement), observability, flexible connectivity, and monitoring.
- You stay current on technology trends in order to deliver innovative tools and approaches to interesting problems.
- You share your expertise with the entire Engineering organization
- You participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation. And yes, we use PagerDuty to manage our on-call schedules.
Basic Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience in SRE, DBRE, or Software Development.
- 3+ years experience with database management systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra, etc.
- Experience in one or more of the following languages like Ruby, Python, or Golang.
- Experience working on cloud-native infrastructure in AWS.
- Experience working with a container scheduler platform, preferably Kubernetes.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform) for managing database & cloud resources.
- Experience with data streaming solutions such as Kafka, AWS Kinesis, etc.
- Knowledge of various Kafka-related tools and frameworks, such as Apache ZooKeeper, Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, or KSQL, can help with integrating Kafka-based solutions with external systems, data sources, and data destinations.
- Experience with monitoring, observability and logging platforms for databases (e.g. DataDog, New Relic, Grafana Logs, etc.).
- Knowledge of configuration management systems like Ansible, Chef, or Puppet for database infrastructure management.
- Experience in automating database releases, continuous integration/delivery systems, and relevant tools (e.g., Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis CI, Buildkite, etc.) with a focus on database performance and reliability.
PagerDuty is a flexible, hybrid workplace. We embrace and encourage in-person working as an integral part of our culture. Both our employees and external research tells us that co-located collaboration strengthens connections, drives innovation, and accelerates learning.
This role is expected to come into our Toronto office 2 days per week, so you can thrive in your new role and fully embrace being a Dutonian!
The base salary range for this position is 137,000 - 207,000 CAD. This role may also be eligible for bonus, commission, equity, and/or benefits.
Our base salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range, which is subject to change based on primary work location, reflects the minimum and maximum base salary we expect to pay newly hired employees for the position. Within the range, we determine pay for an individual based on a number of factors including market location, job-related knowledge, skills/competencies and experience.
Your recruiter can share more about the specific offerings for this role, as well as the salary range for your primary work location during the hiring process.
