Database Engineer

Join Us at PlanSource: Your Exciting Career Awaits!

At PlanSource, a leading cloud-based provider of benefits administration technology and services, we are on a mission to simplify how people choose, use, and manage benefits through cutting-edge, AI-powered experiences. This is an incredible time to launch your career with us!

The Database Engineer is responsible for supporting the reliability, performance, scalability, security, and operational governance of PlanSource's database platforms. This role contributes to lifecycle management for production and non-production database environments, including performance optimization, capacity planning, disaster recovery readiness, cloud modernization, automation, observability, and data lifecycle management.

This role blends traditional database administration fundamentals with modern engineering practices, including automation, cloud-native operations, reliability engineering, observability, and cross-functional partnership with application teams.

The Database Engineer partners with Engineering, DevOps, Infrastructure, Security, Architecture, and business stakeholders to help ensure database platforms remain reliable, resilient, secure, governed, cost-aware, and aligned with business objectives.

Key Responsibilities

Database Reliability & Operations

• Develop and maintain database dashboards, alerts, performance baselines, and operational metrics to improve visibility, reduce alert noise, and support proactive issue detection.
• Support operational health, reliability, and availability of MySQL, Aurora, and RDS environments.
• Monitor, analyze, and optimize database performance across production and non-production environments.
• Troubleshoot database issues across application, database, infrastructure, storage, and network layers with appropriate escalation when needed.
• Contribute to root cause analysis efforts and implement corrective and preventative actions to reduce recurring incidents.
• Participate in 24x7 production support, maintenance windows, and database-related on-call rotations.

Performance Engineering

• Review database-impacting application changes, including schema migrations, indexing changes, query patterns, release risks, and application data access patterns.
• Perform SQL tuning, query optimization, indexing analysis, and workload performance reviews.
• Analyze workload patterns and recommend opportunities to improve scalability, throughput, and customer experience.
• Assist with replication performance, database configuration, storage utilization, and resource consumption optimization.
• Partner with Engineering teams on schema design, query design, application database access patterns, and performance-impacting changes.

Capacity Planning & Scalability

• Contribute to database capacity forecasts based on growth trends, enrollment patterns, utilization, and business demand.
• Identify scaling risks and recommend proactive remediation strategies before capacity or performance constraints impact customers.
• Support sharded database environments, workload balancing, tenant placement analysis, and database growth initiatives.
• Provide capacity, performance, and risk information to Technology leadership and senior technical stakeholders as needed.

Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

• Maintain and execute database recovery procedures.
• Perform backup validation, snapshot review, and restoration testing.
• Participate in failover planning, disaster recovery exercises, and recovery readiness reviews.
• Partner with Infrastructure and Reliability teams to support established RTO and RPO objectives.

Cloud Database Engineering

• Administer AWS RDS and Aurora MySQL database platforms under established standards and patterns.
• Support database modernization, migration, and cloud optimization initiatives.
• Apply cloud database best practices for security, resilience, performance, and cost awareness.
• Assist with multi-region recovery strategies, encryption, backup architecture, and cloud-native operational patterns.

Due to Linkedin character limit: Please see full description on Careers page.

Data Lifecycle Management

Automation & Platform Engineering

Governance & Standards

Success Indicators

About You

Core Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience administering production MySQL-compatible database environments supporting customer-facing or business-critical applications.
• Hands-on AWS database experience, including Amazon RDS and/or Aurora MySQL.
• Strong SQL tuning, query optimization, indexing, and performance troubleshooting skills.
• Experience with backup, restore, replication, and high availability database practices.
• Experience supporting production systems in high-availability, high-volume, or business-critical environments.
• Experience with database monitoring, observability, and performance analysis using tools such as CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus, MySQL Performance Schema, slow query logs, or similar
• Linux administration, shell scripting, or operational automation experience.
• Experience operating in Agile, DevOps, and change-controlled production environments.
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and manage multiple priorities.
• Willingness to participate in production support, maintenance windows, and database-related on-call rotations.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years administering production MySQL environments supporting customer-facing applications.
• Experience with sharded MySQL environments, multi-tenant SaaS platforms, or large-scale distributed database architectures.
• Exposure to Database Reliability Engineering or Site Reliability Engineering practices applied to database platforms.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, including Terraform.
• Experience supporting Microsoft SQL Server environments or working across multiple relational database platforms such as MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or Aurora.
• Experience with data retention, archive, purge, rollback, reinstate, and lifecycle management activities.
• Experience with database modernization, migration, major version upgrades, or cloud migration initiatives.
• Familiarity with incident management, problem management, change management, and architecture governance frameworks.
• Exposure to database cost optimization, AWS cost management, or cloud FinOps practices.
• Experience partnering with application engineering teams on schema design, query design, release readiness, and performance-impacting changes.

Technical & Professional Skills

• Strong understanding of production database operations, including availability, performance, security, backup and recovery, replication, maintenance, and operational governance.
• Experience with database automation and operational tooling to improve consistency, reduce manual effort, and support repeatable maintenance and recovery processes.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, preferably Terraform, for database-related infrastructure, configuration, provisioning, and environment management.
• Experience with database monitoring and performance analysis using tools such as CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus, MySQL Performance Schema, slow query logs, or similar platforms.
• Familiarity with incident management, problem management, change management, and architecture governance practices in production environments.
• Familiarity with cloud database cost optimization, including instance sizing, storage growth, backup retention, replica usage, workload patterns, and cost-aware architecture decisions.
• Experience working across multiple relational database platforms such as MySQL, Aurora MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or PostgreSQL is preferred.

What We Offer - Due to Linkedin character limit: Please see full description on Careers page.

#5: Be part of what’s next in benefits technology

#4: Make an impact with technology our customers trust

#3: Be recognized, supported, and set up to thrive

#2: Grow your career with intention

#1: Be part of a culture built on connection and impact

NOTE: We will consider a remote employee for approved cities PlanSource can accommodate.

If you’re selected, you’ll receive your offer and be asked to complete a background check. This will include a drug screen, criminal record search and verification of previous employment and/or education.

Recruiting Scams: Unfortunately, scams targeting job seekers are common. To protect our candidates, we want to remind you that authorized representatives of PlanSource will only contact you from an email address ending in @plansource.com. PlanSource will never ask for personally identifiable information such as Date of Birth (DOB), Social Security Number (SSN), banking/direct/tax details, etc. via email or any other non-secure system, nor will we instruct you to make any purchases related to your employment. If you believe you’ve encountered a recruiting scam, report it to the Federal Trade Commission and your state’s Attorney General.

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