What you'll do

Our Cloud & Production Engineering team builds and operates complex solutions for global business challenges that cross cultures and legal jurisdictions and impact millions of people and businesses every day. We create, maintain, and operate scalable technology and data solutions that deliver an exceptional experience for our customers. We embrace Agile principles and values, favor DevOps practices, and view infrastructure as code as a foundation for scalable, secure, and reliable operations. We are looking for an engineer who combines deep PostgreSQL expertise with strong automation, systems thinking, and operational ownership. Docusign is looking for a seasoned Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) to design, operate, and continuously improve highly available PostgreSQL platforms across cloud and production environments. In this role, you will own database reliability standards, architecture patterns, operational runbooks, service-level objectives, and recovery strategies. You will partner closely with application, infrastructure, security, and platform engineering teams to provide a dependable PostgreSQL foundation for critical services. You will bring together deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, production operations, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and automation. You will also help build guardrails and self-service capabilities that enable application teams to provision and operate databases consistently and safely. This is an individual contributor role with broad technical influence and a strong mentoring focus.

This position is an individual contributor role reporting to the Senior Director, Software Engineering.

Responsibility

• Design, operate, and continuously improve highly available PostgreSQL environments across cloud and production platforms
• Define and implement database reliability standards, reference architectures, operational runbooks, and service-level objectives
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, query optimization, indexing strategies, and storage growth management
• Establish and maintain backup, restore, point-in-time recovery, disaster recovery, and business continuity processes
• Design, validate, and test replication, failover, partitioning, connection pooling, and high-availability solutions
• Monitor database health, latency, throughput, resource utilization, replication lag, errors, and reliability trends; turn findings into measurable improvements
• Develop automation for provisioning, configuration, upgrades, patching, schema changes, maintenance, and decommissioning
• Create guardrails, APIs, and self-service tooling that enable application teams to provision and operate PostgreSQL databases consistently
• Evaluate new PostgreSQL capabilities, managed database services, extensions, operators, and operational tooling for production suitability
• Participate in incident response and on-call rotations, improving detection, diagnosis, mitigation, and prevention of database-related incidents
• Document technical decisions, operating procedures, failure modes, recovery strategies, and operational readiness criteria
• Mentor engineers and contribute to a culture of automation, operational ownership, learning, and continuous improvement
• Collaborate with engineering teams, technical leaders, security partners, and other cross-functional stakeholders to define durable platform solutions

Job Designation

Hybrid: Employee divides their time between in-office and remote work. Access to an office location is required. (Frequency: Minimum 2 days per week; may vary by team but will be weekly in-office expectation

What you bring

Basic

• 8+ years of hands-on software development experience in an object-oriented programming language such as C#, C++, or Java
• 5+ years of experience operating PostgreSQL in large-scale, highly available production environments
• Experience with PostgreSQL internals, transactions, locking, write-ahead logging (WAL), vacuuming, autovacuum, replication, and recovery
• Experience with database performance analysis, query plans, indexing, connection management, and workload optimization
• Experience designing and validating backup, restore, disaster recovery, and business continuity solutions
• Experience with infrastructure as code and automation using Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent tools
• Experience with Python, Go, Shell, or another scripting or programming language
• Experience communicating clearly with engineering teams, technical leaders, and cross-functional partners
• Experience troubleshooting complex production issues, making sound tradeoffs, and driving problems to resolution

Preferred

• Experience in a Database Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, or production engineering role
• Experience with PostgreSQL operators, managed PostgreSQL services, Patroni, PgBouncer, or comparable technologies
• Experience operating multi-region or globally distributed database platforms
• Familiarity with Kubernetes-based database deployments and GitOps practices
• Experience building internal platforms, APIs, or self-service workflows for database consumers
• Knowledge of database security, compliance controls, audit requirements, and threat modeling
• Experience establishing SLOs, error budgets, operational readiness reviews, and reliability scorecards
• Experience with major cloud platforms and cloud-native observability, automation, and cost-management practices
• Relevant cloud, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, or reliability engineering certifications

Wage Transparency

Pay for this position is based on a number of factors including geographic location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Based on applicable legislation, the below details pay ranges in the following locations:

Washington: $158,300.00 - $232,575.00 base salary

This role is also eligible for the following:

• Bonus: Sales personnel are eligible for variable incentive pay dependent on their achievement of pre-established sales goals. Non-Sales roles are eligible for a company bonus plan, which is calculated as a percentage of eligible wages and dependent on company performance.
• Stock: This role is eligible to receive Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

Global benefits provide options for the following:

• Paid Time Off: earned time off, as well as paid company holidays based on region
• Paid Parental Leave: take up to six months off with your child after birth, adoption or foster care placement
• Full Health Benefits Plans: options for 100% employer paid and minimum employee contribution health plans from day one of employment
• Retirement Plans: select retirement and pension programs with potential for employer contributions
• Learning and Development: options for coaching, online courses and education reimbursements
• Compassionate Care Leave: paid time off following the loss of a loved one and other life-changing events

#LI-Hybrid = Hybrid