Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Location: Pune

About the Role

Modulr is a B2B embedded-payments platform operating at scale in a regulated environment. As we evolve our core data architecture, were hiring our first dedicated Database Reliability Engineer to raise the operational resilience of our payments platform.

This is a hands-on role for someone who thinks like a Site Reliability Engineer but has deep database expertise someone who wants to make a large, busy production estate observable, diagnosable, and safe to operate, and to be the database voice that shapes how we scale. It carries a clear path toward a data-architecture mandate as the platform matures.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the reliability, performance, and observability of our production databases (primarily PostgreSQL / Amazon Aurora), so that issues are seen and understood in minutes, not hours.
• Lead deep-dive diagnosis of production incidents query performance, lock and wait-event analysis, connection-pool behaviour, blocking sessions — and turn findings into lasting fixes and runbooks.
• Build proactive guardrails: query and statement timeouts, connection-pool standards, slow-query and contention alerting, capacity and saturation monitoring.
• Partner with engineering squads to design schemas, indexes, and access patterns that scale, and to enforce safe database practices in their services.
• Contribute the database-reliability perspective to significant platform-evolution work, including separation of read and write paths and the decomposition of shared database components.
• Improve our database observability tooling and dashboards so reliability is measurable and trends are visible before they become incidents.
• Help embed a culture of operational excellence, blameless post-incident review, and continuous improvement.

Person Specification

Essential

• Substantial hands-on experience operating production PostgreSQL (Aurora / RDS a strong plus) at meaningful scale.
• Genuine SRE mindset: comfortable with observability tooling, metrics and tracing, alerting, automation, and infrastructure-as-code — not just database administration.
• Demonstrable strength in performance diagnosis: reading query plans, identifying lock contention and blocking, resolving connection-pool exhaustion, and tuning for throughput and latency.
• Experience supporting high-availability, low-tolerance systems where correctness and uptime both matter.
• Clear, calm communicator who can lead a live incident and explain root cause to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Scripting/automation ability (e.g. Python, Bash) and working familiarity with AWS and Kubernetes-based environments.

Desired

• Exposure to payments, fintech, or other regulated, high-availability domains.
• Experience with data-observability or lineage tooling and with connection-management layers such as PgBouncer / RDS Proxy.
• Familiarity with decomposing monolithic databases and introducing read/write separation.