Senior Database Reliability Engineer

What is a database, if not the heart of integrity and durability in a financial institution? People throughout history have been keeping records of their transactions. But in the late 13th century, Amatino Manucci was quietly working on an innovation that persists to this day: the double-entry accounting system. His books show sophistication and ingenuity that ultimately furthered the blossoming trade of medieval Europe. Double-entry bookkeeping represented a step forward in being able to account for all flows of value with precision, consistency, and durability.

That same fundamental desire for a consistent enduring record has pushed Mercury to build upon what we feel is a modern-day building block: PostgreSQL. It is the underpinning of our platform. PostgreSQL inspires us with its reliability, adaptability, and performance. We wield its features to solve our problems and deliver magical customer experiences. But we also see that we have room to improve and we want someone who can serve as our guide to better data systems.

You will join Mercury as its first DBRE. We have managed to draw on expertise and curiosity across the organization to get us to this point, but see value in having a full-time owner. You bring a sense of direction and organization that helps us unlock the next chapter of Mercury’s growth. PostgreSQL is wonderfully general, but you know its limits and can implement architectures that make sense for the features we are developing.

You will be part of the Stability team: a small group that holds SRE values and seeks to do high-leverage reliability and performance work that benefits Mercury engineering.

You will:

• Guide product engineers towards structures and practices that maximize performance, efficiency, and reliability

• Pair with product engineers on query performance improvements

• Automate processes and distribute knowledge so that you are not a bottleneck

• Drive database upgrades and migrations

• Identify long-term architecture goals and plan, coordinate, and execute incremental steps to achieve those

• Collect and present database metrics to inform scaling and architecture discussions

• Educate product engineers who are generally excited about PostgreSQL, data consistency, correctness, immutability, and performance

• Make code and infrastructure changes so that our applications better interact with the database

You should:

• Have 5 years of experience administering PostgreSQL in medium-to-large organizations

• Have experience with Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Azure Database, or similar managed offerings

• Have 1 year of experience using Infrastructure-as-Code tooling: Terraform is preferred

• Have deep query optimization experience with PostgreSQL

• Know how to combine PostgreSQL with other data systems for cost efficiency, scalability, and reliability reasons

• Be comfortable with a scripting language such as Python

• Be open to learning Haskell/Persistent/Esqueleto to support product engineers

• Be willing to learn and solve new problems

It would be nice if you:

• Have experience with Amazon Aurora

If this role interests you, we invite you to explore our public demo at demo.mercury.com. Our team recently launched an in-product Help Menu in which you can access from the ? icon in the lower right corner.

The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity (stock options), and benefits. Our salary and equity ranges are highly competitive within the SaaS and fintech industry and are updated regularly using the most reliable compensation survey data for our industry. New hire offers are made based on a candidate’s experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.

Our target new hire base salary ranges for this role are the following:

• US employees (any location): $203,100 - $238,900
• Canadian employees (any location): CAD $184,800 - $217,400

Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC.

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