Database Engineering Architect

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a high-performing, cloud-native database engineering team (hire, mentor, and develop top talent).
• Define and drive the technical roadmap for MSSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB database services in AWS.
• Ensure security, availability, scalability, resilience, and cost-efficiency of database platforms.
• Partner with Cloud Infrastructure, Software Engineering, and Enterprise Architecture teams to ensure seamless database integration into cloud architectures and applications.
• Oversee automation of database provisioning, maintenance, backups, high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), and scaling operations (IaC, CI/CD pipelines, etc.).
• Define and enforce best practices for database security, monitoring, performance tuning, and compliance (e.g., encryption, access control, logging).
• Provide hands-on support in solving complex database challenges and performance issues.
• Lead capacity planning, budget forecasting, and vendor/license management for database platforms.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and cloud-native thinking across the database organization.
• Establish clear KPIs, SLAs, and operational excellence metrics for database services.
• Plan and drive the decommissioning or migration of legacy database systems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in database engineering or database administration with 3+ years leading and managing database engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience running MSSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB workloads in AWS at scale.
• Expertise in cloud-native database architectures, including managed services like RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, and/or self-managed clusters on EC2/Kubernetes.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure principles (VPC, IAM, security groups, encryption, multi-AZ deployments).
• Proven success transforming legacy database operations into cloud-optimized, automated environments.
• Deep knowledge of high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR) strategies, cost optimization, and backup/restore methodologies for databases.
• Practical experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Excellent leadership skills: recruiting, coaching, developing talent, and creating high-trust teams.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills — able to work cross-functionally and align technical solutions to business goals.
• Ability to work with team members from around the globe/experience working with offshore models

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS certifications (especially AWS Certified Database - Specialty or AWS Solutions Architect).
• Experience with Kubernetes Operators for databases (e.g., MongoDB Atlas Operator, SQL Server HA with Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with serverless database patterns (e.g., Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, DynamoDB hybrid architectures).
• Experience with security frameworks (e.g., NIST, CIS Benchmarks) and compliance (e.g., SOC2, HIPAA).
• Familiarity with FinOps concepts to optimize cloud database costs.
• Experience migrating large-scale database workloads to AWS.
• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines for database schema changes (e.g., Flyway, Liquibase).
• Knowledge of observability tooling for databases (e.g., Datadog, New Relic, AWS CloudWatch, Prometheus).