Database Reliability Engineer (DRE)

Airtable enables any team to create apps on top of shared data and power their most critical and unique workflows. Teams at more than 300,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100, rely on the Airtable Connected Apps Platform to connect their people and data and achieve their most important goals. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, Airtable ranks #6 on the Forbes Cloud 100 and has raised $1.36 billion to date.

The Storage team at Airtable is looking for Database Reliability Engineers (DREs) to own the reliability, scalability, and performance of our MySQL database infrastructure. DREs at Airtable combine the deep database expertise of database administrators with the engineering methodology and operational discipline of site reliability engineers. We run petabyte-scale MySQL clusters that serve hundreds of thousands of queries per second, and DREs are critical to Airtable's success as we continue to scale.

As a DRE at Airtable, you will be entrusted with identifying and leading large projects to enhance our database infrastructure. You will work closely with software engineers and site reliability engineers to execute these projects, with a particular focus on aspects like reliability, observability, and operational ease-of-use.

As an example of what you might work on, we blogged about our team's work upgrading our database infrastructure from MySQL 5.6 to MySQL 8.0.

Some potential projects on the horizon include:

• Implementing a zero-downtime failover capability for MySQL, to improve both mean-time-to-recovery and our own operational capabilities. This may involve reworking our ProxySQL architecture, or using open-source tools like Orchestrator.
• Develop self-service tooling and frameworks that allow product developers to independently provision and operate new database clusters.
• Cost optimization of our database infrastructure. This includes a variety of improvements like automated processes for deleting and archiving cold data, increasing the storage density of our databases, and exploring alternative database instance types.
• Creating a testing framework that can validate large MySQL infrastructural changes with production-level load.
• Evaluating next-generation distributed databases like Vitess, TiDB, CockroachDB, etc, with a focus on aspects like fault-tolerance, backup/restore, observability, and operational capabilities.

As a member of the Storage team, you will participate in an on-call rotation for our transactional storage systems. DREs are exemplary incident responders: able to apply rigorous thinking and strong debugging skills to quickly remediate problems during high-pressure situations, and afterwards leading blameless postmortems to understand and address underlying root causes.

Finally, as one of the first DREs at Airtable, you will have the opportunity to influence the Storage team's vision and strategy, and create and evangelize best practices, processes, and tooling related to our database infrastructure.

What you'll do

• Own all aspects of the reliability, scalability, and performance of Airtable's MySQL database infrastructure, using a data-driven approach (metrics, SLOs) to prioritize improvements.
• Work with technologies like MySQL, RDS, Terraform, NodeJS, TypeScript, Datadog, ELK, and Sentry.
• Partner with SWEs to identify and lead projects to enhance Airtable's MySQL database infrastructure, working collaboratively to gather requirements, align stakeholders, and develop and execute project plans.
• Build tools to automate operational processes, with a focus on reducing manual work and improving developer velocity.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to maintain high-scale, mission-critical databases that are essential to Airtable.
• Influence the vision, strategy, and culture of a rapidly growing team.

Who you are

• You have 1+ years of experience operating high-scale production database clusters (MySQL, Percona Server, MariaDB, Vitess, TiDB, etc).
• You are curious, driven, and thorough. Whether it's scripting bulletproof automation, testing scripts, writing recovery playbooks, or digging into logs to address an incident, you value thoroughly understanding the root cause of a problem, solving it, and solving it well.
• You enjoy writing clean, maintainable, well-tested code. In some situations it's the right decision to move fast and incur technical debt, but with the understanding that it needs to be paid back later.

Compensation awarded to successful candidates will vary based on their work location, relevant skills and experience. The base salary range for this role is $165,400 - $216,000 for work locations in San Francisco, Mountain View, Seattle, NYC and LA. Our total compensation package also includes the opportunity to receive benefits, restricted stock units, and may include incentive compensation. To learn more about our comprehensive benefit offerings, please check out Life at Airtable.

Airtable is an equal opportunity employer. We embrace diversity and strive to create a workplace where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or any characteristic protected by applicable federal and state laws, regulations and ordinances. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant.

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If you have a medical condition, disability, or religious belief/practice which inhibits your ability to participate in any part of the application or interview process, please complete our Accommodations Request Form and let us know how we may assist you. Airtable is committed to participating in the interactive process and providing reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants.