Senior Database Engineer

About Tekion:

Positively disrupting an industry that has not seen any innovation in over 50 years Tekion has challenged the paradigm with the first and fastest cloud-native automotive platform that includes the revolutionary Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC) for retailers Automotive Enterprise Cloud (AEC) for manufacturers and other large automotive enterprises and Automotive Partner Cloud (APC) for technology and industry partners. Tekion connects the entire spectrum of the automotive retail ecosystem through one seamless platform. The transformative platform uses cutting-edge technology big data machine learning and AI to seamlessly bring together OEMs retailers/dealers and consumers. With its highly configurable integration and greater customer engagement capabilities Tekion is enabling the best automotive retail experiences ever. Tekion employs close to 3000 people across North America Asia and Europe.

As a Senior Database Engineer at Tekion you will design automate and optimise database operations across our cloud-native automotive retail platform connecting OEMs dealerships partners and consumers. Youll be working on scaling problems laying down processes and streamlining requirements to actual executable tasks.

Youre expected to know in-depth about different storage and replication internals trade-offs across SQL/NoSQL technologies distributed systems fundamentals transaction interaction and concurrency. A combination of this with strong Python fundamentals and Python scripting experience would make you a strong candidate for this role.

You should have at least 4 years of experience. You should know about MongoDB in depth and at least one SQL database like MySQL MariaDB PostgreSQL. People who want to build systems not just manage them.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Core Database Engineering & Distributed Systems (Primary Focus):
1. Debug and prevent concurrency issues (deadlocks lock escalation starvation long-running transactions) and advise teams on safe patterns (idempotency retries backoff fencing tokens).
2. B-tree/LSM trade-offs page layout WiredTiger cache journaling WAL/redo/undo checkpoints compaction MVCC behaviour
3. Backups (Logical vs Physical vs Snapshots based) upgradation of database systems and versions data migration and Disaster Recovery implementation
4. Query planner behaviour statistics cardinality estimation pitfalls
5. Indexing strategies and write amplification trade-offs
2. Reliability Engineering Observability & Incident Response :
   Build and implement database reliability practices:

1. Lead incident response and postmortems; implement preventative controls and automated remediation.
2. Implement monitoring and alerting for replication lag lock contention buffer/cache health slow query patterns storage growth and failover events.

1. Python Automation & Platform Tooling (Required):
   Develop and maintain robust Python tooling/services for:

• Automated health checks failover verification backup/restore validation and consistency checks.
• Online schema change orchestration safe rollout/rollback workflows and guardrails in automation.
• Performance diagnostics automation (plan capture workload fingerprinting).
• Build scalable automation that handles millions of records/events efficiently (attention to time/space complexity).

1. Data Modelling Across SQL & NoSQL:
   Guide data modelling decisions across relational and document/Key-Value stores:

• Normalisation vs denormalisation trade-offs
• Secondary index design hot partition mitigation and throughput planning
• TTL archiving and lifecycle policies
• Define governance for data correctness durability and operational safety in high-throughput systems

1. Collaboration Standards & Enablement

1. Partner with application teams to design safe data access patterns migration strategies and operational standards.
2. Define best practices for production change management access controls auditing and compliance requirements.
3. Mentor engineers and raise the bar on database engineering craftsmanship across the org.

Qualifications & Skills

Must have

• 4 years of work experience as an engineer in a relevant role and responsibilities.
• Strong foundation in distributed systems and database fundamentals: CAP consensus basics replication failure handling and consistency.
• Deep understanding of transaction semantics isolation levels MVCC locking concurrency failure modes storage engines and DB internals.
• Strong Python skills for building production-grade automation and diagnostics tooling.
• Hands-on experience operating and tuning production databases (MongoDB and at least one SQL system such as MySQL PostgreSQL MariaDB etc).
• Strong debugging and performance analysis skills; comfortable working from metrics logs traces and low-level symptoms.
• Experience working with Linux and familiarity with common commands.

Nice to Have

• Experience with multi-region data architectures global tables and cross-region failover strategies.
• Familiarity with AWS and MongoDB Atlas.
• Understanding of Networking concepts like VPC subnets security groups CIDR peering etc.
• Experience with Kubernetes and/or self-managed database experience
• Experience building internal platforms (self-serve database ops policy-as-code safe migration frameworks).

What Were Looking For

A senior engineer who:

• Thinks in trade-offs (latency vs consistency durability vs throughput cost vs performance) thinks deeply.
• Can reason from first principles about database behaviour under failure and load.
• Uses Python to operationalise best practices into repeatable safe automation and can instruct others on best practices.
• Drives reliability performance and correctness across both SQL and NoSQL systems.
• Leads through technical clarity ownership and mentorship.

Tekion is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race religion color national origin gender (including pregnancy childbirth or related medical conditions) sexual orientation gender identity gender expression age status as a protected veteran status as an individual with a disability victim of violence or having a family member who is a victim of violence the intersectionality of two or more protected categories or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

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