Senior Database Reliability Engineer (Senior DRE)

Who We Are

NEXT Ventures is where ambition takes shape and movement becomes momentum. As a global platform revolutionising access to performance-based capital, we empower the world’s most driven individuals to rise. Through our flagship brand, FundedNext, we empower dreamers to become doers, and potential to turn into performance. With 500+ driven minds across five countries, we power a global rhythm—220,000+ daily users from 170+ nations, each chasing greatness in their own way.

Your Role in Our Mission

As the Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you’ll be the dedicated owner of database reliability across our real-money trading products, operating within a multi-region AWS environment with multi-terabyte databases and tables containing hundreds of millions of rows. As our Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you’ll combine hands-on database engineering with technical leadership, driving performance, recoverability, and operational excellence across our data tier. You’ll establish engineering standards, mentor junior engineers, lead critical database incidents, and work closely with engineering and business leaders to ensure our data infrastructure remains reliable, secure, and ready to scale.

How You’ll Make an Impact

Database Performance & Architecture

• Own query performance and latency across Aurora MySQL and PostgreSQL through execution-plan analysis, indexing strategies, and database statistics optimization.

• Design and implement partitioning, sharding, and data lifecycle strategies for high-volume tables.

• Identify and remove unused or redundant indexes to improve database efficiency.

• Build zero-downtime archiving pipelines using S3, Parquet, and Athena while keeping seven years of compliance data queryable.

Reliability, Recovery & Incident Management

• Own disaster recovery across the data tier, including Aurora Global Database, cross-region replication, and failover automation.

• Define, test, and track recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) through regular disaster recovery drills.

• Maintain replication, backup, and point-in-time recovery (PITR) health, including routine restore testing.

• Lead data-tier incidents as incident commander, coordinate response efforts, make informed recovery trade-offs, and drive blameless root-cause analyses.

Safe Database Changes & Infrastructure

• Lead safe schema and data migrations on live tables using online DDL, expand-contract patterns, and AWS DMS/CDC where appropriate.

• Own caching reliability across ElastiCache/Redis, including invalidation strategies, TTL hygiene, and failure handling.

• Manage database configuration and infrastructure as code using Terraform.

• Define and monitor data-tier SLIs and SLOs, building effective observability and alerting with Datadog or similar tools.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

• Establish standards for schema reviews, migration safety, database access control, and change governance.

• Mentor and coach junior database reliability engineers, review their work, and help them develop sound technical judgment.

• Partner with application engineering, data engineering, and product leaders to identify risks arising from query patterns and schema design.

• Own the data-tier roadmap and communicate priorities, risks, and trade-offs clearly to engineering leadership and the CTO.

• Contribute to hiring, capacity planning, and the continued development of our database reliability function.

What You Bring

• 8–10 years in database engineering, database reliability engineering, or site reliability engineering, including several years owning production databases at multi-terabyte scale.

• Strong hands-on knowledge of MySQL and PostgreSQL; experience with Aurora/RDS is strongly preferred.

• Daily experience using agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf beyond basic prompts and autocomplete. You can configure project-level instructions and rules files, delegate tasks to AI agents, and integrate AI into code reviews while independently validating its outputs.

• Production experience with partitioning, sharding, and archiving large tables.

• Direct experience executing database failovers or recovery drills, with measured RTO/RPO targets.

• A methodical approach to diagnosing issues before making changes, validating solutions on replicas, and protecting production data.

• Proficiency in Python or Bash scripting, Terraform, and infrastructure automation.

• Experience with Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, or comparable monitoring and alerting tools.

• Experience mentoring engineers, leading production incidents, and making sound decisions while remaining hands-on.

• Ability to explain technical risks, recovery trade-offs, and database priorities to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Your X-Factor

• Daily hands-on experience with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf, going beyond basic chatbot prompts and code autocomplete.

• Experience setting up project-level AI instructions and rules files, such as CLAUDE.md, and delegating tasks to AI agents.

• Ability to integrate AI into code reviews, identify potential issues, and independently validate AI-generated outputs.

• A strong understanding of AI safety in database engineering, including reviewing AI-generated SQL and testing changes on replicas before considering them for production.

Your Journey after Applying

• 30 minute HR interview with the Talent Acquisition team member

• 45 minute Problem Solving Interview

• 60-minute Bar Raiser Interview

Why Join NEXT

At NEXT Ventures, we believe the right talent fuels breakthrough innovation. If you're driven to connect great minds with big ideas and want to shape the future of fintech, we’d love to meet you. Join our team of bold thinkers where technology meets transformation.

Apply now and be part of our journey — the future is calling, and it starts with you.