Senior Database Engineer (DBRE)

About this role

The application window is expected to close on: 08/25/2026 Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received .

Meet the Team  

The Database Reliability Engineering team builds and   operates   the production database and data systems that power Cisco Meraki's cloud platform and Dashboard. We make high-volume device telemetry ingestion, customer-facing data access, product workflows, analytics, monitoring, and operational   data   needs reliable at   global   scale, so engineers and customers can depend on the data behind Meraki's products.  

  Our work sits at the intersection of database engineering, reliability engineering, and platform operations, with a focus on high availability, business continuity, performance, scalability, observability, and safe change management. We are a small, experienced team with a high-ownership, pragmatic, and collaborative culture; we work closely with SRE and product engineering teams while owning critical systems end to end.  

  This is an opportunity to work on core data reliability problems where improvements in automation, resilience, and operability have an immediate impact across Meraki.  

Your Impact  

As a Senior Database Reliability Engineer, you will help make Meraki's database and data systems reliable, scalable, secure, and operable. You will combine database engineering, reliability engineering, and platform automation to support relational databases, streaming systems, analytical stores, and low-latency data services.  

  You will work closely with SRE, application engineering, security, and infrastructure teams to improve the availability and performance of our data systems, reduce operational toil, and guide safe architectural changes as the platform grows.  

You can expect to:  

• Plan, administer,   maintain , and secure the PostgreSQL infrastructure in collaboration with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to ensure high performance and reliability.  

• Design, build, and maintain ETL pipelines for PostgreSQL, as well as develop procedures and scripts for data migration.  

• Perform operational database administration tasks such as installation, upgrades, patching, backup/recovery, monitoring, capacity planning, and   architectural changes in cloud environments.  

• Participate   in production operations   such as on-call rotation,   incident response, monitoring, alerting, and post-incident review processes.  

Minimum Qualifications  

• 5+ years of experience designing,   operating , and troubleshooting PostgreSQL in production environments.  

• 5+ years of experience managing production database or distributed data systems across   application ,   database , operating   system , storage, and network layers.  

• 3+ years of experience in Linux systems engineering (performance tuning, memory management, I/O tuning, configuration, security, and networking) and automating infrastructure or database operations with tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet.  

• 2+ years of experience using at least one scripting or programming language such as Python, Bash, Go, Ruby, or Perl for automation and operational tooling.  

• Experience working in a polyglot production data environment, including at least one non-PostgreSQL system such as Kafka/MSK,   ClickHouse , Redis, MySQL, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, or a similar distributed data system.  

Preferred Qualifications  

• Experience building database   platform   tooling, self-service workflows, and paved paths that enable application teams to use data systems safely and efficiently.  

• Previous   work with cloud infrastructure and managed data services, including PostgreSQL on Kubernetes, Amazon RDS, AWS, Terraform, service discovery, and   secrets   management.  

• Ability to operate MSK/Kafka,   ClickHouse , or Redis at scale, covering cluster operations, replication, partitioning or sharding, retention, capacity planning, and workload tuning.  

• Previous   responsibility for refining reliability practices for production data systems, such as SLOs, disaster recovery plans, backup validation, and failover testing.  

• Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals and operational behavior, including concurrency, transaction consistency, replication, maintenance, backup and recovery, indexing, and query performance.  

• Ability to communicate effectively in writing and verbally by producing design documents, leading operational reviews, explaining tradeoffs, and mentoring engineers.  

Why Cisco?  At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.  We are Cisco, and our power starts with you. 

Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada:

The starting salary range posted for this position is $167,700.00 to $245,200.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits. Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the r

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