Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Cobalt Streamworks is proud to be an award-winning company recognized both locally and nationally across multiple workplace categories. Our world-class culture is shaped by dedicated team members who are driven to succeed as professionals individually and together as a team. Backed by a strong product, exceptional people, and a stable financial foundation, we’ve grown into a leading provider of used and new car financing across the country. Our Engineering and Analytics Team Members utilize the latest technology to develop, monitor, and maintain complex practices that help optimize our success. Our Team Members value being challenged, are encouraged to express their ideas, and have the flexibility to enjoy work life balance. We build intrinsic value by partnering with all functions of our business to support their success and make strategic business decisions. We focus on professional development and continuous improvement while enjoying a casual work environment and Great Place to Work culture! As a Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you will ensure the availability, reliability, performance, and security of enterprise database systems supporting Cobalt Streamworks applications. This role focuses on reducing operational toil through automation, enabling secure, scalable database platforms, and empowering engineering teams through self-service capabilities and DevOps integration. You will partner with application, infrastructure, and data teams to build and operate modern database platforms, support data replication and migration initiatives, and drive continuous improvements in reliability and efficiency. Outcome and Activities This position will work from home; occasional planned travel to an assigned Southfield, Michigan office location may be required. However, this position is permitted to work at a Southfield, Michigan office location if requested by the team member Platform Engineering & Automation Design and implement automated database provisioning and configuration management Develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) Build self-service database capabilities and platform APIs Implement event-driven automation and auto-remediation workflows Establish policy-driven guardrails for database configuration, access, and compliance Integrate database services into CI/CD pipelines and release workflows Reliability, Availability & Resilience Define and manage Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) Design and maintain high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) architectures Perform failover testing and resilience validation Lead incident response, root cause analysis (RCA), and post-incident reviews Drive improvements in MTTD and MTTR Performance & Scalability Engineering Monitor and optimize database performance, query efficiency, and throughput Identify and resolve application-database performance bottlenecks Design for scalability and workload isolation (replicas, partitioning, sharding) Conduct capacity planning and forecasting Optimize cost-performance efficiency in cloud environments Observability & Monitoring Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks Define and track database golden signals (latency, errors, throughput, saturation) Build dashboards for health, performance, and capacity trends Integrate telemetry into central observability platforms Develop proactive alerting and anomaly detection Data Replication & Migration Design and manage replication strategies (logical, physical, CDC) Implement and operate AWS DMS or equivalent tools Enable near real-time data movement across systems Troubleshoot replication lag and data consistency issues Support large-scale database migrations (e.g., Oracle → PostgreSQL/Aurora) Security & Access Control Implement least privilege, role-based access controls Enable Just-In-Time (JIT) access using PAM solutions (e.g., CyberArk) Enforce secure access patterns and eliminate direct production DB access Manage credentials using centralized secrets management Ensure adherence to audit, compliance, and governance requirements Support encryption standards (in transit and at rest) Database & Data Access Engineering Support data modeling, indexing, partitioning, and schema optimization Demonstrate familiarity with modern database access technologies: ORM frameworks (Hibernate, JPA, SQLAlchemy) JDBC and connection management best practices GraphQL and API-driven data access patterns Design and promote Data Access Layer (DAL) architectures Optimize data access patterns to improve performance and scalability Developer Enablement & DevOps Integration Manage database schema lifecycle using version-controlled tools (Liquibase/Flyway) Enable automated deployments and zero-downtime database changes Implement testing strategies for database changes Partner with engineering teams to improve database usage patterns Provide guidance on best practices, ORM usage, and performance tuning Promote shift-left a