Site Reliability Engineer lII (DBA) - LATAM

Backblaze · Colombia

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About Backblaze

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking a Site Reliability Engineer III (DBA) in LATAM to join our team!

About the Role

We are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer III with a Database Administration focus to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production database systems, primarily Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra, alongside the rest of our production services and infrastructure.

This database specialization is layered on top of the full SRE III scope on the team. You will carry the same on-call, incident response, and service ownership expectations as other SRE IIIs, with database systems serving as your area of deepest technical ownership.

Because our SRE Database Engineering function is new, this role will also help establish its operational foundation by designing database architecture and developing the runbooks, escalation guidance, procedures, and training materials that our Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers will use as they onboard.

The ideal candidate will have strong experience with production database systems, Linux, automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes, observability, and incident response, with a proactive approach to reliability and operational excellence.

What You'll Do:

• Database Architecture & Administration:

  • Design, deploy, and own highly available database architecture for Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra.
  • Establish and document operational procedures, runbooks, and escalation guidance for Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers.
  • Optimize database performance through query tuning, indexing strategies, schema design, and capacity planning.
  • Own database backup, recovery, replication, and disaster recovery strategies.
  • Perform and validate disaster recovery testing and database recovery procedures.
  • Drive database security, access control, patching, hardening, and compliance practices.
  • Serve as an escalation point for complex database production incidents.
  • Partner with the DBA and Data Infrastructure teams on resharding, capacity planning, replication, and architecture decisions for sharded MySQL environments.

• Service Reliability & Operations:

  • Support the availability and durability of critical services across production environments.
  • Monitor service health using SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, monitoring, logging, and alerting platforms.
  • Partner with service owners to define and improve SLIs, SLOs, error budget policies, and alerting.
  • Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
  • Serve as an escalation point for complex production database and infrastructure incidents.
  • Follow established ITIL/OSS processes including incident, change, problem, and capacity management.
  • Take ownership of operational issues and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.

• Automation & Tooling:

  • Develop automation for common operational and database administration tasks to reduce manual intervention and operational toil.
  • Contribute to monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks including Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, and ELK.
  • Help integrate operational runbooks and incident response workflows with FireHydrant.
  • Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools including Terraform, Ansible, and Jenkins.
  • Develop scripts using Bash, Python, Go, or similar technologies to improve reliability and operational efficiency.
  • Operate and troubleshoot containerized production environments using Kubernetes and Docker.
  • Work within Kubernetes and Vitess environments using technologies such as kubectl, mysqlsh, and Vitess keyspaces.
  • Work with HashiCorp technologies including Terraform, Vault, and Nomad.

• Project Management & Collaboration:

  • Lead Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs) for functionality being handed off from engineering partner teams.
  • Support the operational readiness of new database-backed services before they enter production.
  • Build training plans, onboarding materials, and technical documentation for new Level 1 and Level 2 SRE Database Engineers.
  • Partner with Engineering, Product, Operations, and DBA/Data Infrastructure teams on reliability initiatives.
  • Assist with capacity planning, disaster recovery exercises, database migrations, and infrastructure projects.
  • Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
  • Identify opportunities for automation and process efficiency.
  • Share technical knowledge and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.

• Incident Response:

  • Respond to and resolve production database, infrastructure, and service incidents.
  • Troubleshoot and escalate database, Linux, networking, application, and infrastructure issues as needed.
  • Participate in the on-call rotation and serve as an escalation point for database-related incidents.
  • Lead or contribute to root cause analysis and post-incident reviews.
  • Identify recurring issues and develop long-term corrective actions to improve reliability.
  • Design action plans to address recurring operational and database problems.

• What We Value:

  • A proactive mindset with a can-do attitude.
  • Someone who can work independently, take ownership, and drive complex technical problems through resolution.
  • Someone who steps up, supports teammates, mentors others, and shares knowledge freely.
  • Strong problem-solving skills and a willingness to learn new technologies.
  • Curiosity, reliability, and a desire to improve the reliability and scalability of production systems.

Required Qualifications:

• 6–8 years of experience in site reliability engineering, systems engineering, infrastructure operations, database engineering, or similar roles, with meaningful experience supporting production database systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with MySQL and distributed or sharded database systems.
• Experience with Vitess in a production environment strongly preferred.
• Experience administering and supporting NoSQL databases such as Cassandra.
• Experience designing high-availability database architecture, replication topology, backup strategies, and disaster recovery processes.
• Strong SQL skills, including query performance analysis, indexing, schema design, and troubleshooting.
• Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Experience with security-focused operations including patching, system hardening, access controls, and vulnerability remediation.
• Strong understanding of service reliability concepts including monitoring, alerting, incident response, root cause analysis, SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
• Experience working with containers and orchestration platforms including Kubernetes and Docker.
• Comfortable operating in Kubernetes and Vitess environments using tools such as kubectl, mysqlsh, and Vitess keyspaces.
• Experience with infrastructure and configuration management technologies including Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, and HashiCorp products such as Vault and Nomad.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language such as Python, Bash, or Go.
• Experience establishing operational procedures, runbooks, documentation, and escalation processes.
• Experience mentoring, training, or helping onboard engineers into complex technical environments.
• Experience supporting large-scale, production-grade systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Direct production experience with Vitess.
• Experience with large-scale distributed or sharded MySQL environments.
• Experience with Cassandra or similar distributed NoSQL databases at scale.
• Experience in SaaS, cloud services, service provider, or large-scale distributed systems environments.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar cloud platforms.
• Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLA/SLO management.
• Experience leading Production Readiness Reviews.
• Experience developing onboarding or technical training materials for engineers.
• Experience acting as a technical escalation point for database or infrastructure incidents.

At this point, we hope you're feeling excited about the job description you're reading. Even if you don't meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Learning, developing, and growing are key parts of our culture. We're eager to meet people who believe in our mission and can contribute to our team in various ways. We want people to feel comfortable expressing their true selves and to come, stay, and do their best work here.

At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries, but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.

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