Staff Database Reliability Engineer

About Checkr Checkr is building the data platform to power safe and fair decisions. Over 140,000 companies and millions of people rely on Checkr for AI verification in the moments that matter most: getting a new job, a new place to live, a car ride, childcare, even a date. Customers include Uber, Pennymac, Airbnb, Doordash, and Anthropic.

We’re a team that thrives on solving complex problems with innovative solutions that advance our mission. Checkr is recognized on Forbes Cloud 100 2025 List and is a Y Combinator 2024 Breakthrough Company.

About the team/role

Reporting to the Manager, DevOps Engineering, you will lead the architecture, reliability, and operational excellence of Checkr’s core data stores. Checkr offers fantastic AI enablement, and you'll use AI tooling throughout your day-to-day.  In this role, you will own database capacity planning, financial forecasting, high availability, disaster recovery, and infrastructure-as-code automation across high-scale distributed data stores. Partnering closely with Infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, Core Services, and Product Engineering teams, you will establish fleet-wide data governance and performance standards that power Checkr's continuous platform growth.

What you'll do

• Lead and execute the architectural design, high availability strategies including multi-region, and business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions across Checkr’s multi-cloud database fleet.

• Inspire and drive high standards across the team by mentoring and growing engineers.

• Drive the long-term vision and strategy of database architecture at Checkr; communicate that strategy in a way that resonates with engineers and upper leadership, and propose projects that move the company towards that vision

• Ensure the security of highly sensitive data through encryption and security-first architecture

• Provision, scale, and maintain cloud database systems across production, staging, and sandbox environments using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Terragrunt).

• Optimize database performance at the query, schema, connection, and instance levels across PostgreSQL or MySQL, and MongoDB workloads.

• Partner with Site Reliability Engineering to build proactive observability, automated alerting, and diagnostic tooling for database health and performance metrics.

• Automate operational toil, maintenance workflows, schema migrations, and backup lifecycle policies to improve reliability and engineering velocity.

• Lead incident diagnosis, resolution, and post-incident reviews for critical database alerts and outages across customer-serving infrastructure.

What you bring

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)

• 10+ years of experience designing, administering, and scaling relational and non-relational database storage architectures in production environments.

• Deep expertise managing and tuning MongoDB and PostgreSQL or MySQL database topologies at high volume and scale.

• Understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including data structures and software design principles, and the ability to apply them to solve technical challenges.

• Extensive hands-on experience with AWS database and storage ecosystems, including RDS, Aurora, ElastiCache, MongoDB Atlas, and S3.

• Demonstrated track record of automating cloud infrastructure and database operations using Terraform, Terragrunt, and modern scripting languages.

• Strong technical leadership skills with a proven ability to guide engineering teams through database schema design, zero-downtime migrations (e.g., gh-ost), and security compliance standards.

• An A-player mindset with a strong bias for action: you raise the bar, move with urgency, stay resilient through ambiguity, and take ownership to deliver meaningful outcomes.

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