Lead Software Engineer - Site Reliability

Job Title: Site Reliability Engineer (DBRE)
Job Type: Full-time
Level: IC3 (Staff Software Engineer)

About the Role

As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer specializing in Databases (DBRE), you will lead the design, implementation, and evolution of highly available, scalable, and resilient data infrastructure. This role demands deep technical expertise in database systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and automation, combined with a strong sense of ownership and strategic thinking. You will mentor engineers, influence architectural decisions, and partner with engineering and product teams to drive reliability and performance across the organization’s database platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Provide strategic technical direction and mentorship to DBRE and engineering teams. Drive best practices in database architecture, observability, and reliability engineering.

• Database Architecture & Reliability: Design and implement scalable, fault-tolerant database systems. Lead optimization efforts across multiple database platforms to ensure uptime, performance, and resilience.

• Infrastructure as Code & Automation: Architect and build robust automation pipelines for database provisioning, upgrades, backups, and disaster recovery using tools like Terraform, Ansible, or Kubernetes Operators.

• Cloud-Native & Kubernetes Expertise: Define and implement strategies for running databases on Kubernetes (e.g., via Vitess, CrunchyData, or KubeDB). Champion adoption of operators, Helm charts, and CI/CD for DB deployments.

• Incident Management & RCA: Own and lead complex incident investigations, blameless postmortems, and deep root cause analysis. Drive systemic fixes and reliability improvements.

• Observability & Capacity Planning: Define SLOs/SLIs for database systems. Lead initiatives to build and maintain robust observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent tools.

• Security and Governance: Establish and enforce security controls, data access policies, and compliance procedures. Lead security reviews and collaborate closely with compliance and infosec teams.

• Cross-Team Collaboration: Serve as a subject matter expert and collaborate with product, platform, and SRE teams to influence technical direction and architectural decisions related to data infrastructure.
   

Technical Skills & Experience

• Extensive hands-on experience with relational databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) and distributed NoSQL systems (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB, DynamoDB).

• Proven track record of designing and operating databases in large-scale cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure).

• Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or Bash for building infrastructure tooling and automation frameworks.

• Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm, Ansible) and Kubernetes for managing production database systems.

• Deep knowledge of database replication, clustering, backup/restore, and failover techniques.

• Advanced experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic) for monitoring distributed databases.

• Strong communication skills and ability to influence across teams and levels.

At Freshworks, we are creating a global workplace that enables everyone to find their true potential, purpose, and passion irrespective of their background, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. We are committed to providing equal opportunity for all and believe that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant, richer work environment that advances the goals of our employees, communities and the business.