Director, Database Reliability Engineering

About Qualys

Qualys, Inc. (NASDAQ: QLYS) is a pioneer and leading provider of disruptive cloud-based security, compliance, and IT solutions with more than 10,000 subscription customers worldwide, including a majority of the Forbes Global 100 and Fortune 100. Qualys helps organizations streamline and automate their security and compliance solutions onto a single platform for greater agility, better business outcomes, and substantial cost savings.

Qualys is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Please see our EEO policy for details.

Director, Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE)

Location: Pune | Organization: Engineering Operations | Reports To: VP, Operations & DevOps

Team Size: 30 Engineers

Come work at a place where innovation and teamwork come together to support the most exciting missions in the world!

The Opportunity

Qualys runs one of the largest and most complex data platforms in the enterprise security industry — a massive Oracle and Exadata estate at the core, surrounded by a self-managed open-source big data fabric: Kafka, Hadoop, Cassandra, OpenSearch, Redis, Ceph, and Kubernetes. These systems directly underpin the product SLAs we deliver to 10,000+ customers worldwide.

We are looking for a Director of Database Reliability Engineering who combines deep technical craft with the leadership instinct to scale a team and the builder's mindset to ship systems that eliminate toil. You don't have to be the world's leading expert in every technology on the stack — but you must carry genuine depth in Oracle or large-scale distributed data systems, with strong working knowledge across the broader ecosystem, and the intellectual range to go deep where the situation demands it. We do not expect day-one mastery across every system; we expect depth in core areas and the proven ability to rapidly develop expertise where the platform needs it.

This role directly owns database platform operations and reliability practices, and influences adjacent infrastructure and application teams through technical credibility and cross-functional partnership. You will lead a team of 30, serve as the final technical escalation point for the data platform, and shape the multi-year strategy for how Qualys builds, automates, and evolves its data infrastructure.

Core Focus Areas

This is a wide-scope role. Here is how candidates should prioritize their self-evaluation:

01 Oracle + Distributed Systems Technical Depth — Deep in one, strong across the other — enough to lead architecture and hold the team accountable

02 Data Platform Reliability & Incident Ownership — SLOs, escalation authority, DR, predictive capacity — the foundational mandate

03 AI-Driven Automation & Toil Elimination — Building and shipping agents, not just evaluating tools — measurable impact on MTTR and operational load

04 Team Leadership & Org Development — Managing 30 across ICs and managers; building culture, career ladders, and hiring bar

05 Vendor Management & Cost Optimization — Oracle relationship, licensing discipline, and infrastructure cost efficiency

Lead and Develop the DBRE Team

• Manage, mentor, and develop 30 DBAs, SREs, and data platform engineers across individual contributors and engineering managers
• Define hiring standards, career ladders, and team structure that attract and retain senior database and reliability talent
• Build a culture of technical rigor, blameless learning, and relentless automation — where manual toil is a bug, not a process
• Eliminate single points of knowledge failure through documentation, cross-training, and disciplined on-call rotation design
• Own workforce planning: headcount forecasting, skills gap analysis, and building specialist sub-teams as the platform evolves

What We Are Looking For

Must Have

• 15+ years in database engineering, reliability engineering, or data platform operations — with 5+ years leading multi-person teams including at least one layer of managers
• Deep expertise in Oracle or large-scale distributed data systems, with strong working knowledge across the broader ecosystem (Kafka, Cassandra, Hadoop, OpenSearch, Redis, Ceph, Kubernetes)
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals — replication and consensus models, storage I/O, network latency tradeoffs, and scaling patterns for stateful workloads — applied to real production decisions
• Shipped operational tooling or agents using LLM APIs with measurable impact (MTTR reduction, toil elimination, alert noise reduction) — production systems, not proofs of concept
• Oracle vendor relationship management — commercial negotiation, license compliance ownership, and technical escalation through Oracle's support and sales organizations
• Infrastructure cost control — hands-on experience right-sizing compute and storage, eliminating idle capacity, and building cost visibility (chargeback/showback) across database infrastructure
• Track record leading teams of 15+ engineers with both IC and manager-level reports; experience growing technical talent and building hiring bars
• Executive communication skills — translating database risk, reliability posture, and investment needs to C-suite audiences with clarity and commercial grounding
• Experience serving as final escalation point for production data platform incidents — with the technical depth to diagnose, direct, and close

Strong Plus

• Exadata-specific depth: IORM policy tuning, smart scan diagnostics, storage server failure recovery, and hardware lifecycle decision-making
• Kubernetes-native data platform experience with stateful workload operators (Strimzi, Cassandra Operator, OpenSearch Operator, Redis Operator)
• Experience with AIOps or observability platforms (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) including custom exporter and agent development
• Familiarity with agentic integration patterns (MCP, tool-use APIs) for building AI-augmented operational toolchains
• Hands-on coding in Python, Go, or shell scripting — enough to design and ship internal tooling independently
• Background in security or compliance-adjacent industries where data integrity and auditability carry regulatory weight