Senior Database Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Database Engineer with deep expertise in PostgreSQL and AWS Aurora to join our global infrastructure team. You will own the reliability, performance, and scalability of the database platforms that support Turnitin’s educational technology services.

This role combines strategic project delivery with hands-on operational support in a fast-moving, highly available production environment. The successful candidate operates with a high degree of autonomy, drives work to completion with minimal oversight, and collaborates effectively with teammates across multiple time zones.

Responsibilities: 

• Own the reliability, performance, and day-to-day operation of production database platforms, balancing project delivery with operational support.
• Design and evolve highly available database architectures in AWS to meet uptime, latency, scalability, and recoverability goals.
• Lead database lifecycle activities, including provisioning, upgrades, migrations, backup/restore processes, and disaster recovery readiness.
• Drive performance improvements by investigating production issues, identifying root causes, and implementing durable solutions in partnership with application and infrastructure teams.
• Establish and maintain operational excellence: monitoring, alerting, runbooks, documentation, and incident response practices.
• Define and enforce database security standards, access controls, and auditing aligned with internal policies and compliance requirements.
• Automate repeatable operational tasks and standardize infrastructure delivery using Infrastructure as Code and scripting.
• Perform capacity planning and cost optimization; provide recommendations based on observed workload trends and business growth.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and lead/participate in post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence.
• Collaborate with a globally distributed team, including regular attendance at meetings multiple times per week within the 16:00–19:00 GMT time range.