Staff Database Reliability Engineer

Come do the best work of your life at Boulevard.

We’re hiring a Staff Database Reliability Engineer to shape the foundation of Database Reliability Engineering at Boulevard. This role goes beyond optimizing queries or reviewing SQL PRs — you’ll own database reliability at scale within our cloud-based infrastructure, influence site reliability practices, and drive our RDBMS scalability strategy. You’ll help teams improve how they design, operate, and depend on databases through repeatable, reliable practices.

Reporting to the Director of Cloud & Reliability, this is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on elevating reliability practices and building resilient database platforms. You’ll define what “good” looks like, partner closely with engineering teams, and help Boulevard operate databases that scale with confidence.

The Cloud & Reliability group operates on four foundational principles:

1. Reliable Infrastructure — a foundation of stability and security
2. Developer Productivity — empowering builders to do the right things
3. Clear Ownership — accountability aligned with ownership; collaboration over silos
4. Long-Term Focus — we engineer for tomorrow

• Database Reliability & Fault Tolerance: Lead initiatives to make our database platforms more robust, fault-tolerant, and self-healing.
• Platform Performance Optimization: Drive continuous improvement in performance and cost efficiency, using observability data to identify and resolve bottlenecks with a focus on RDBMS infrastructure.
• Observability & Operational Insight: Enhance database observability across metrics, logging, and tracing to ensure deep visibility into production health and behavior.

• Develop a deep understanding of how Boulevard’s systems behave, scale, interact, and fail, and use that insight to identify risks and improvement opportunities.
• Own and improve database reliability, performance, and scalability; participate in incident response and drive architectural improvements that reduce incident frequency and impact.
• Partner with engineering teams to design, build, and operate scalable, fault-tolerant, and secure distributed systems that support Boulevard’s growth and customer trust.
• Build tools, automation, and frameworks that eliminate toil, reduce operational overhead, and establish best practices used across engineering teams.
• Elevate observability and operational excellence through actionable metrics, alerts, and dashboards that enable faster incident resolution and proactive reliability improvements.
• Mentor and influence engineers across the organization, helping foster a culture where reliability is a shared responsibility.

• Deep Systems Expertise: 8–10+ years of experience in systems, infrastructure, or backend software engineering, with a strong focus on RDBMS and NoSQL systems.
• Cloud Database Experience: Production experience with managed cloud databases such as AWS Aurora/RDS (PostgreSQL), and deploying/managing infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Reliability Engineering Mindset: Proven experience delivering reliability outcomes using SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and mature observability practices.
• Automation-First Philosophy: Strong background in automation, scripting, and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Python, Go, or similar).
• Incident Management Mastery: Experience diagnosing and mitigating production incidents in high-availability systems, with a focus on learning and continuous improvement.
• Collaboration & Influence: Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence without authority across engineering teams.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Demonstrated ability to set technical standards, mentor engineers, and scale impact through others.
• Comfort with Ambiguity: Ability to navigate uncertainty, set direction, and iterate toward meaningful outcomes in a fast-moving environment.

• Experience with Elixir, Phoenix, Ruby, or Rails
• Hands-on experience identifying and improving database performance

At Boulevard, we work hard to structure compensation in a way that balances internal equity with local market competitiveness, and we’re happy to share a good-faith estimate of the base salary range for this role. For U.S. based candidates, the anticipated base salary range is $183,000 - $225,000 per year. In addition to this base compensation, this role may be eligible to participate in a variable compensation program. Final compensation will vary based on a variety of factors which include but are not limited to applicable experience, location, and final leveling.