Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Database Infrastructure

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About Zello

Zello is a voice-first communication platform powered by our industry-leading push-to-talk technology to improve collaboration and productivity for desk-less workers. With over 175 million users were the #1 rated push-to-talk app in the world delivering 9 billion (yes with a B) messages a month.

At Zello our company values are at the heart of what we do everyday. Were proud to serve the frontline were privileged to connect people in times of crisis across the globe and were honored to support first responders.

And this is where you come in.

Were seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer who can own our data tier at high availability while also pulling weight across the broader platform. As Zello scales the line between database problem and platform problem keeps blurring. We want someone who can sit on either side of it. This hire owns our data tier reliability (MySQL MongoDB ScyllaDB Elasticsearch Redis) and contributes to monitoring on-call and our ongoing cloud modernization efforts.

About Zello

Zello is the leading push-to-talk communication platform enabling instant voice communication for frontline workers across hospitality logistics transportation construction and public safety. When a hotel manager radios housekeeping or a trucker calls dispatch theyre on Zello and they need it to work every time. The Platform team builds and operates the infrastructure that makes that possible. Databases sit at the center of that promise: every channel every message every login depends on them.

The Role

Youll join the Platform team and report to the Director of Platform Engineering. Youll own the reliability of our MySQL and MongoDB footprint across Google Cloud work alongside application engineers on performance and schema decisions and contribute to the broader platform observability with Prometheus Loki and Tempo; on-call; incident response;. This role suits someone who likes operating real production systems doesnt get stage fright in incidents and writes the runbook for the next person who hits the same problem.

Were investing in AI to compress incident response build agents and tooling that speed up root-cause analysis and lift developer productivity across engineering. We want someone curious about what that looks like for an SRE and excited to help shape it.

After a Successful First Year You Will Have:

• Operated Zellos MySQL and MongoDB clusters to documented availability targets with automated backups regularly tested restores and failover the on-call team trusts under real incident pressure.

• Cut latency or capacity cost on at least one critical database workload through measurable performance work index strategy query tuning schema changes or sharding.

• Extended our Observability coverage so incidents are diagnosed in minutes rather than hours with dashboards and alerts the team actually uses.

• Owned a slice of the Platform on-call rotation and led postmortems that turned recurring incidents into permanent fixes.

What Youll Do

• Design deploy and operate highly available MySQL and MongoDB clusters across our cloud environments; replication sharding backups point-in-time recovery upgrades and disaster recovery.

• Tune query performance schema and index strategy in partnership with application engineers and push fixes upstream into the application when thats the right answer.

• Extend our observability stack Prometheus Loki and Tempo so the data tier is as well instrumented as the application tier and traces actually reach the root cause.

• Participate in the Platform on-call rotation lead incident response for data-tier issues and write postmortems that drive durable change.

• Improve disaster recovery security posture and compliance for our database footprint encryption access control audit logging backup integrity.

• Evaluate and operate ScyllaDB/Cassandra and Elasticsearch where they fit the workload and bring an opinion on when they dont.

• Write the automation tooling and operators that take repetitive work off the teams plate.

• Use AI to compress incident response and root-cause analysis; building agents automation and developer-enablement tooling that scale the teams reliability work

Who You Are

• Youve operated highly available MySQL and MongoDB in production at scale; replication sharding backups point-in-time recovery and failover drills youve actually run not just designed on paper.

• You diagnose database performance end-to-end; query plan indexes locking OS storage network and can point to specific incidents where you found and fixed root cause that others had missed.

• Youve shipped meaningful work on at least two of bare metal Linux containerized workloads (Docker Kubernetes or similar) and a major cloud (GCP preferred; AWS or Azure equivalent is fine).

• You instrument what you build. Youve used Prometheus OpenTelemetry or comparable systems to close real incidents and youve written the dashboard the next on-call engineer will actually open.

• You write code that runs in production: Python Go Bash or similar for automation tooling or operators. You dont hand off scripting to someone else.

• You communicate clearly under pressure and after the fact. Your postmortems are blameless specific and lead to changes that stick and the people youve worked with describe collaborating with you as straightforward.

• You bring an opinion on managed vs. self-managed databases and can defend the trade-off based on availability cost and operational burden.

• 7 years in SRE DevOps platform infrastructure or database reliability roles with at least 3 years owning production databases.

• BSc in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

• ScyllaDB/Cassandra or Elasticsearch experience is a plus

• Youve used AI tooling: copilots agents or custom automation to expedite incident response root-cause analysis or developer workflows.

We hire for potential passion for our mission and a knack for solving difficult problems over checking every qualification box. We have competitive pay equity with significant upside and intentionally design our benefits to encourage healthy and well-balanced employees flexible schedules and time off. We even offer a sabbatical after every five years of service so youre able to pursue and enjoy what matters most to you. And of course we wouldnt be a technology company without a ping-pong table and free snacks in our break room. Join us!

Zello provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race color religion age sex national origin disability status genetics protected veteran status sexual orientation gender identity or expression or any other characteristic protected by federal state or local laws.

All Zello personnel are required to comply with defined security privacy and compliance requirements applicable to their role along with requirements that are applicable to all Zello personnel.

Required Experience:

Senior IC