Sr. Database Reliability Engineer II

Role overview

A senior engineering role focused on architecting, evolving, and optimizing the data platform behind a high-volume retail trading application. Rather than a traditional database administration position, it is a software engineering role for someone with deep MySQL or PostgreSQL expertise who continues to write production code while serving as the team's database authority. The work blends data architecture, performance engineering, developer tooling, and operational reliability for a growing platform.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve MySQL schemas that support high-volume transactional workloads.
• Drive data platform improvements such as online schema changes, low-downtime migrations, and blue/green deployment patterns.
• Analyze and optimize SQL queries, indexes, and execution plans to lift application performance.
• Build production software that strengthens the persistence layer, developer tooling, and data platform capabilities.
• Create reusable libraries, frameworks, and tooling that simplify data access for other engineering teams.
• Investigate complex production issues spanning concurrency, locking, data integrity, and database behavior.

Requirements

• Background as a software engineer who has grown into a database specialist through hands-on production work.
• Deep expertise with MySQL and PostgreSQL, including schema design and performance tuning.
• Strong coding skills and ability to ship production-quality software, not just administer databases.
• Experience with safe, repeatable migration strategies in a continuous delivery environment.
• Comfort partnering with engineers, architects, and platform teams on technical direction.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with MySQL on Amazon RDS, Aurora, or similar cloud-managed database services.
• Background supporting financial services, trading platforms, or other high-throughput transactional systems.
• Experience in startup or high-growth environments where engineers owned both application and database performance.
• Work on highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems, observability, telemetry, or applying AI/ML tooling to engineering productivity.

Benefits and work setup

• Salary range of $130,000 to $180,000 USD plus a 10 percent annual target bonus split between individual and company performance.
• 401(k) plan with up to 3.5 percent company match, 18 days of accrued PTO plus seven paid holidays, paid parental bonding leave, and health, vision, and dental coverage.
• Life and disability insurance fully covered by the employer.
• Hybrid schedule based in Chicago with in-office Tuesday through Thursday and remote Mondays and Fridays, plus 20 additional flex remote days annually and five office-optional weeks tied to major holidays. Remote flexibility may be considered for exceptional candidates in several other U.S. states.