Principal Engineer (Managed Database Services)

As a Principal Engineer you'll spearhead the design, development, and operation of scalable, high‑availability, and high-performance database platforms across relational and non-relational managed services (Managed MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, etc.) and scale-out variants that scale to petabytes of data. Drive architectural vision, technical excellence, and innovation across both backend systems and customer-facing interactions.

Key Responsibilities:

Architect and Build

• Design and evolve the architecture of large-scale distributed database systems optimized for scalability, reliability, low-latency, and cost efficiency
• Architect solutions for storage engines, indexing, querying, caching, replication, and high availability, drawing from best practices in both relational and NoSQL paradigms
• Roll out new services by taking on a hands-on lead role as required to ensure timely delivery

Technical Leadership

• Establish and enforce technical standards, coding practices, tooling, and infrastructure guidelines across the database engineering teams
• Mentor other senior engineers, shaping the team’s culture of architectural rigor and operational excellence

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Work with product managers, stakeholders, and business leaders to translate strategic objectives into scalable technical roadmaps
• Guide customer-facing teams (e.g., consultants, support, sales engineers) to define database solutions and migration strategies aligned with organizational goals

Reliability, Performance & Scaling

• Lead Operations Excellence for database services, establish mechanisms and processes that scale to the engineering organization while raising the bar
• Oversee availability, performance tuning, failover strategies, capacity planning, and disaster recovery for database platforms.
• Drive automation (e.g., IaC, CI/CD pipelines, deployments, monitoring) to optimize operations

Innovation & Future Roadmapping

• Research and integrate advanced capabilities (e.g., AI‑assisted tooling, MCP protocols) to enhance developer workflows and metadata accessibility across database types

• Technical Experience: ≥ 12–15 years in distributed systems architecture, database internals (storage, indexing, query optimizers), and cloud infrastructure.
• Domain Expertise: Hands-on experience designing and operating production-grade systems on one or more database services in the Cloud.
• Leadership & Collaboration: Prior experience as a technical visionary in large-scale, mission-critical projects; ability to align technology strategy with business impact.
• Automation Proficiency: Familiarity with infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, and observability frameworks.
• Communication & Mentoring: Strong written and verbal communication skills with a track record of mentoring senior and junior engineers; translating complex concepts across engineering and business teams.