Senior Database Engineer

Become a better developer by building things that help local businesses around the world thrive  

Are you a passionate, energetic technology enthusiast eager to work at a rapid pace with the flexibility to work across a broad tech stack? 

The GDS team is found in 2014 in Groupon to support Relational databases MySQL and PostgreSQL. The GDS team takes care of databases in Groupon.  Our main focus is to keep the customer happy, in our case, the customer is our developers, /managers, and product owners our customers.
Database Engineer: Establishes database management systems, standards, guidelines and quality assurance for database deliverables, such as conceptual design, logical database, capacity planning, external data interface specification, data loading plan, data maintenance plan and security policy. Documents and communicates database design. 

 We’re excited about you if you have:

• 7+ years of hands-on experience administering, optimizing, and scaling MySQL and PostgreSQL databases in high-availability production environments.
• Infrastructure-as-Code proficiency with Terraform and Ansible, including authoring and maintaining reusable modules for database provisioning and configuration management.
• Deep expertise in AWS and GCP cloud services, with strong working knowledge of RDS, Aurora (including Aurora Serverless), Cloud SQL, EC2, VPC networking, IAM, and related infrastructure components.
• Experience with tools like Percona toolkit, PgBadger, PgRepack, etc is good to have
• Extensive experience leveraging AI-powered tools to accelerate productivity across database operations, scripting, troubleshooting, and documentation workflows.
• Comprehensive DB operations experience spanning schema design and migrations, large-scale data backfills, instance provisioning, major/minor version upgrades, cross-instance and cross-region database migrations, and production incident troubleshooting.
• Monitoring and observability skills, including hands-on experience with Prometheus/Grafana ( Observability) for metrics collection and alerting, and Amazon CloudWatch for log aggregation, custom dashboards, and alarm configuration.
• EC2 & VM instance lifecycle management, including provisioning, patching, right-sizing, and performance tuning of database host infrastructure.
• Solid understanding of database security best practices, including encryption at rest and in transit, access controls, and audit logging.
• Experience working in large-scale environments managing hundreds of database instances across multiple teams and business domains.

You’ll spend time on the following:

• Managing and maintaining hundreds of MySQL and PostgreSQL databases that power Groupon's global marketplace, ensuring reliability, performance, and data integrity at scale.
• Architecting and maintaining high-availability database solutions, including replication topologies, automated failover configurations, and resilience testing to meet Groupon's uptime and SLA commitments.
• Upgrading database engines and infrastructure across environments with minimal downtime, following well-documented runbooks and change management processes.
• Provisioning new database instances using Infrastructure-as-Code pipelines, ensuring consistency, security compliance, and rapid delivery for development teams.
• Planning and executing database migrations — including cross-instance, cross-engine, and cross-region migrations — with comprehensive validation and rollback strategies.
• Designing and managing backup and restore strategies, including automated snapshot schedules, point-in-time recovery testing, and disaster recovery readiness.
• Troubleshooting and resolving performance issues by analyzing query execution plans, identifying bottlenecks, tuning configurations, and collaborating with engineering teams to optimize database workloads.
• Mentoring and training junior and mid-level team members, conducting knowledge-sharing sessions, and contributing to internal documentation and best-practice guides.

We value engineers who are:

• Customer-focused: We believe that doing what’s right for the customer is ultimately what will drive our business forward.

• Obsessed with Quality: Your Production code Just Works & scales linearly

• Team players. You believe that more can be achieved together. You listen to feedback and also provide supportive feedback to help others grow/improve.

• Fast learners: We are willing to disrupt our existing business to trial new products and solutions. You love learning how to use new technologies and then rapidly apply them to new problems.

• Pragmatic: We do things quickly to learn what our customers desire. You know when it’s appropriate to take shortcuts that don’t sacrifice quality or maintainability.

• Owners: Engineers at Groupon know how to positively impact the business.