About the RoleAt Happen Bank, our mission is to empower people working toward better financial health. That mission depends on highly reliable, secure, and scalable data platforms that support millions of financial transactions in a regulated environment.
The Database Engineering team owns the foundational database infrastructure that powers Happen Bank's products and internal platforms. This team is responsible for the design, operation, and continuous evolution of our database systems, ensuring they meet the highest standards for availability, performance, security, and compliance.
Our platform leverages a broad set of technologies, including AWS-managed services (Aurora, RDS, DocumentDB, ElastiCache, OpenSearch), relational databases (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server), data replication technologies (GoldenGate), and modern analytics platforms such as Snowflake.
As Sr Manager, Database Engineering, you will lead this critical function and define the long-term vision for database engineering. You will manage and grow a team of experienced Database Engineers, partner closely with application, platform, and data engineering leaders, and serve as a trusted advisor on database architecture, scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency. This is a highly visible role with direct impact on platform reliability, developer productivity, and customer trust.
What You'll Do- Define and own the database engineering strategy and roadmap, ensuring the platform is reliable, performant, scalable, and aligned with business growth
- Lead, mentor, and develop a team of Database Engineers, fostering a culture of operational excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement
- Partner with application, platform, and data engineering teams to establish standards for database architecture, schema governance, and query performance
- You drive intentional AI adoption in team workflows, maintaining rigor around data quality and accountability.
- Drive initiatives to improve availability, resiliency, security, and observability across production and non-production database environments
- Champion automation, tooling, and self-service capabilities that reduce operational overhead and enable developers to safely and efficiently work with database systems
- Act as a strategic advisor to engineering leadership on database architecture, capacity planning, risk management, and cost optimization
- Ensure database platforms meet regulatory, security, and compliance requirements appropriate for a digital bank
About You- 2+ years of experience leading and developing engineering teams, with 8+ years of hands-on experience in database engineering or DBA roles
- Deep expertise in at least one major relational database platform (Oracle, PostgreSQL, or MySQL), including performance tuning, replication, and high-availability architectures
- Proven experience designing, operating, and scaling high-volume OLTP systems in production environments
- Strong working knowledge of AWS infrastructure and managed database services (e.g., RDS, EC2, VPC, IAM, S3)
- Experience using Python or similar languages to build automation, tooling, and operational workflows
- Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively across engineering, product, security, and operations teams
- Bachelor's degree in a related field; or equivalent work experience
Nice to Have- Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform
- Prior ownership of mission-critical systems with strict uptime and reliability requirements
- Hands-on experience designing disaster recovery, backup, and multi-region scalability strategies in cloud environments
- Experience working in financial services, fintech, or other regulated industries
Work Location San Francisco
The above locations are eligible offices for this role. The locations have been determined to foster in-person collaboration with this role's team or the related business lines. We utilize a hybrid work model, and our teams are in-office Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. In-person attendance is essential for this role's success, and remote placement will not be considered. Happen Bank offers relocation, based on actual job level.
Time Zone Requirements Primarily PT
While the position will primarily work local hours, Happen Bank is headquartered in Pacific Time and our ideal candidate will be flexible working across time zones when necessary.
Travel Requirements As needed travel to Happen Bank offices and/or other locations, as needed.
Compensation The target base salary range for this position is 197,000-230,000. The base salary of the role will be determined by job-related knowledge, experience, education, skills, and location. Base salary is just one part of Happen Bank's Total Rewards package. You may also be eligible for long-term awards (equity) and an annual bonus (which is based on company performance, employee performance and eligible earnings).
We're creating new financial services solutions for our members based on fairness, simplicity, and heart, and we treat our employees the same way. We offer a competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision plans for employees and their families, 401(k) match, health and wellness programs, flexible time off policies for salaried employees, up to 16 weeks paid parental leave and more.
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