Site Reliability Engineer ll (DBA)

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $136M ARR and is the leading specialized storage cloud, managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. We’re seeking a Sr. Reliability Engineer ll (DBA) to join our team!

About the Role

We are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with a DBA (Database Administration) focus to help ensure the stability, scalability, and reliability of our production database systems - primarily Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra - alongside the rest of our services and infrastructure. This role operates within procedures and runbooks established by our senior DBA SREs, and focuses on building automation, maintaining observability, and supporting incident response to keep customer-facing systems performing at their best.

The SRE will collaborate with engineering, product, and operations teams to embed reliability practices into day-to-day development and operations while contributing to tools and processes that improve efficiency and reduce manual effort

Key Responsibilities

Database Administration

• Operating and maintaining high-availability database systems — primarily Vitess (distributed MySQL) and Cassandra — against established architecture and runbooks.
• Optimizing database performance through query tuning, indexing strategies, and schema design.
• Executing documented backup, recovery, and replication procedures to ensure data durability; escalating architecture-level changes to senior DBA SREs.
• Ensuring database security compliance and access control.

Service Reliability & Operations

• Support the availability and durability of critical services across production environments.
• Monitor service health using SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and escalate issues when thresholds are at risk.
• Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews to drive service improvements.
• Follow established ITIL/OSS processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management).

Automation & Tooling

• Develop automation for common operational tasks, reducing manual intervention and toil.
• Contribute to monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Catchpoint, ELK), and help integrate runbooks with FireHydrant.
• Work with CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins).
• Write scripts (Bash, Python, Go, etc.) to improve system reliability and efficiency.

Collaboration

• Partner with engineering, product, and operations teams to support resilient system design and operations.
• Assist in capacity planning and disaster recovery exercises.
• Work with vendors and service providers to troubleshoot service issues and track SLA performance.
• Document systems, share learnings, and help grow a reliability-minded engineering culture.

Continuous Improvement

• Contribute to playbooks, runbooks, and operational documentation.
• Identify recurring issues and propose long-term improvements.
• Promote reliability-focused practices within development and operations teams.

Qualifications

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 2–4 years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or operations centered around database systems.
• Exposure to large-scale, production-grade systems. This is a Level 2 role executing established database operations procedures — architecture and design ownership sits with our Level 3 DBA SREs.

Technical Skills

• Solid Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Familiarity with service reliability concepts - monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go).
• Understanding of containers (Kubernetes, Docker) and microservices concepts; comfort operating in a Kubernetes/Vitess-on-K8s environment (kubectl, mysqlsh, Vitess keyspaces) is a plus.
• Knowledge of incident response and operational best practices.
• Hands-on experience with MySQL performance tuning, replication, and disaster recovery; direct experience with Vitess or other distributed/sharded MySQL systems is a plus, but not required — strong MySQL fundamentals matter most.
• Proficiency in SQL and NoSQL database management.

Preferred Attributes

• Experience in a SaaS, service provider, or distributed systems environment.
• Familiarity with ITIL/OSS practices and SLO/SLA’s
• Strong problem-solving skills and willingness to learn new technologies.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Ability to work independently, take ownership, and drive projects from problem discovery through resolution.

At this point, we hope you're feeling excited about the job description you're reading. Even if you don't meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Learning, developing, and growing are key parts of our culture. We're eager to meet people who believe in our mission and can contribute to our team in various ways. We want people to feel comfortable expressing their true selves and to come, stay, and do their best work here.

At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries, but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.

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