Database Platform Engineer at Mercor

Database Platform Engineer | $160–300k | San Francisco, CA

Join Mercor as a Database Platform Engineer and take ownership of the performance, scalability, and reliability of our production database systems, focusing on Amazon RDS for MySQL. Collaborate with backend and infrastructure teams to ensure robust, efficient, and secure data operations that support rapid company growth.

• Design and maintain high-availability RDS clusters for optimal performance.
• Optimize queries, indexes, and schemas to enable low-latency workloads at scale.
• Implement observability through monitoring, alerting, and performance dashboards.
• Manage backups, restores, failovers, and disaster recovery processes.
• Collaborate with engineers to refine data models, migrations, and query patterns.
• Automate routine tasks such as patching, scaling, and parameter tuning.
• Enforce security best practices including IAM roles, encryption, and auditing.
• Plan for capacity growth and support major product launches with cross-functional teams.

Requirements:

• 5+ years managing production MySQL databases.
• Expertise in SQL, query optimization, and index tuning.
• Hands-on experience with Amazon RDS (Multi-AZ, read replicas, Aurora).
• Understanding of database internals, transaction isolation, and replication.
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform) and monitoring tools (CloudWatch, Datadog).
• Strong problem-solving, debugging, and communication skills.

Preferred: Experience with MongoDB, Redis, ElastiCache, Snowflake, and security/compliance frameworks. Startup experience is a plus.