Staff Database Reliability Engineer

Our Mission & Values:
At Drata, we help companies earn and keep the trust of their users, customers, partners, and prospects. We’re the proof layer that shows great companies deserve the trust they aim to build.

We live our values every day. Built on Trust means consistency is everything. Act with Integrity by always doing the right thing. Being Customer-Obsessed keeps the people we serve at the center of our work. Competitive Fire drives us to push ourselves harder than anyone else. Diversity brings unique perspectives that lead to better solutions. Automation First ensures we save time and money by making efficiency a priority.

Our Culture & Work Style 🚀

At Drata, we’re not just building software - we’re building a mindset. Everything we do springs from:

• Be a Driver (Owner‑Operator Mentality): Own your work. Improve relentlessly. Deliver results.

• Move at Drata Speed (Precision & Velocity): Fast decisions. Quick learning. Immediate impact.

• Stay Mission-Driven (Customer‑Obsessed): Challenge assumptions. Deliver value. Stay hungry.

We pair that high-velocity culture with a thoughtful hybrid model because we believe flexibility and collaboration both matter. That’s why in the Bay we come together in-office Tuesday through Thursday our high‑impact collaboration days where teams align, strategize, and innovate. Mondays and Fridays are flexible, giving you space for focused work, balance, and autonomy.

If you thrive when you’re empowered, energized, and working with smart, mission-driven people where you’ll feel at home here.

Why Join The Drata Team?

The best way to understand the Driver’s Mindset is to see it in action. We’re an award-winning, mission-driven team of 600+ people worldwide, united by a culture that values trust, speed, and continuous growth.

• See the Speed: Watch our CEO, Adam Markowitz, discuss the hyper-growth journey, from $0 to $100M ARR in just four years

• Hear the Voice of the Team: Explore our "Life at Drata" page for employee testimonials on our collaborative and the growth opportunities available.

• Experience the Impact: See why we are consistently recognized on Fortune's Best Workplaces lists.

• Connect with Us on Socials: LinkedIn - follow us for company updates, employee stories, and career news.

Job Summary:

As a Staff Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE), you'll be the technical authority and strategic leader for all things related to Drata's database architecture. You'll own the long-term vision for our data infrastructure, guiding engineering teams and driving significant performance and scalability improvements. Your expertise will be key to shaping our architecture as we grow, ensuring our systems are not just reliable, but exceptionally performant and future-proof. You will be a hands-on evangelist for best practices, combining deep-level query optimizations with high-level architectural leadership to truly elevate how we use our data.

What you’ll do:

• Lead Strategic Initiatives: Drive the long-term strategy for scaling, resiliency, and performance of our AWS Aurora clusters and replication environments. You'll be the primary architect for our evolving data stack.

• Serve as a Technical Expert & Evangelist: Act as the lead consultant for engineering teams, providing deep technical guidance on data modeling, query optimization, and architectural patterns. You will proactively evangelize best practices for schema design, efficient SQL queries, and index usage across the entire organization, helping to raise the bar for database knowledge company-wide.

• Deep Dive into Performance: Proactively identify and resolve complex performance bottlenecks. You'll use advanced observability tools to analyze and tune difficult queries, data migrations and pinpointing issues before they impact our users.

• Evangelize Architectural Vision: Lead the evaluation, prototyping, and eventual adoption of new database technologies and architectural approaches to meet our growing business needs.

• Own Observability: Take full ownership of our database observability, defining and implementing key metrics and dashboards to ensure we have a comprehensive, real-time view of database health and performance.

What you’ll bring:

• Experience: 15+ years of experience with large scale MySQL systems, with a strong emphasis on performance tuning and a deep understanding of its internal architecture.

• Infrastructure: Extensive hands-on experience with AWS Aurora administration and proven expertise in complex performance tuning, backup, and recovery strategies.

• Mentoring: Demonstrated experience guiding and influencing multiple engineering teams on database best practices and architectural decisions.

• SQL: Exceptional expertise in writing, analyzing, and optimizing complex SQL queries and a deep knowledge of relational database design concepts.

• Programming: Proven experience working with Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks (bonus if you have experience with TypeScript and TypeORM).

• Problem-Solving: Exceptional analytical and troubleshooting skills with the ability to dive deep into a problem and emerge with a clear solution.

• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical issues to a diverse audience. You are a collaborator and a natural leader.

• Bonus points: Experience with AWS Elasticache (Redis), AWS DynamoDB or other NoSQL databases.

How we support you:
At Drata, our people are our strongest advantage—and we prove it with support that exceeds industry standards. Our total rewards package is designed to power your well-being, accelerate your growth, and keep your work-life balance thriving.

Explore how we invest in your Life at Drata.

• Shared Success: We provide stock equity to ensure that as the company grows, you share directly in that success. Equity gives every employee a sense of ownership and the opportunity to celebrate our wins together—because your contributions don’t just support our progress; they help drive our collective success.

• Health & Wellness: Up to 100% employer-paid premiums for medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents, along with comprehensive wellness benefits and healthcare concierge services designed to support your needs beyond traditional insurance.

• Financial Well-being: A comprehensive suite of financial benefits, including a 401(k) plan, company-paid life and disability insurance, tax-advantaged spending accounts, and a range of discounted voluntary offerings to help you customize and strengthen your overall financial position.

• Family Support: Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave (after six months of employment), along with a robust suite of family-support resources. Employees also receive access to Kindbody fertility and family-building benefits and dedicated leave specialists who help guide you through the entire process.

• Growth & Development: Generous annual stipends for both professional and personal development, empowering you to invest in your continued growth. You’ll also have access to a wide range of internal learning opportunities, ensuring you can build new skills, deepen your expertise, and advance your career with confidence.

• Time Off & Flexibility: We believe that to do your best work, you should get the time you need for rest, rejuvenation and recovery. Drata offers a flexible vacation policy, paid holidays, and other perks to recharge.

This role will receive a competitive base salary, benefits, and stock, typically in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). The applicable salary range for this role is: $220,800 - $272,700, subject to change.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s leveling and compensation–including a candidate’s professional background and experience. This range may be modified in the future and final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed above.