Senior Database Reliability Engineer I - Germany/Austria/UK

Storyblok is a headless CMS that enables marketers and developers to create with joy and publish with confidence. It empowers you to deliver structured and consistent content everywhere: websites, apps, AI search, and beyond. Legendary brands like Virgin Media O2, Oatly, and TomTom use Storyblok to make a bigger, faster market impact. WHAT IS IN IT FOR YOU You will be joining a growing company where you can contribute to many “firsts”. Plus these benefits: • Monthly remote work stipend (home internet costs, electricity). Home office equipment package right at the start (laptop, keyboard, monitor…) • Home office equipment upgrade (furniture, ear plugs …) or membership to a local co-working space after your onboarding • Sick leave benefit, parental leave and 25 days of annual leave plus your local national holidays • Personal development fund for courses, books, conferences, and material • The annual international team-building trip, quarterly and monthly online get-togethers • As a fully remote company, with work-life balance at its core, you’ll enjoy flexible schedules • An international team that loves to have fun at work and works hard together to accomplish shared goals JOB SUMMARY You will own the reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of the PostgreSQL data platform behind our flagship CMS — primarily Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL — along with the infrastructure and automation around it. This is a reliability engineering role, not a classic administration one. Aurora takes care of patching, backups, failover, and storage growth; you own what it does not — query and index strategy, plan regressions across major version upgrades, vacuum and bloat, connection management, zero-downtime schema change, logical replication, and capacity and cost modeling. Alongside this, you work as a full member of the Infrastructure team on Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and security tooling, and you share the on-call rotation. You will work in a shared-ownership model: backend teams own their queries and schemas, and you own the platform, guardrails, tooling, and knowledge-sharing that make their decisions safe. You will collaborate closely with backend engineers, DevOps engineers, Security, product owners, and the Data team. We measure success by the reliability and predictable performance of the data platform, the quality of your incident response, and how well other engineering teams are equipped to make sound database decisions without you in the room. ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS Database platform (approx. 60%) • Own the reliability, performance, and scalability of our PostgreSQL platform (primarily Amazon Aurora): query and index strategy, execution plans, configuration tuning, and capacity planning, with particular attention to hot multi-tenant read paths. • Lead zero-downtime version upgrades and schema migrations at scale, including diagnosing and preventing plan regressions across Aurora major versions. • Own the operational health of the platform: vacuum strategy and bloat, long-running transactions and wraparound risk, connection management and pooling (including RDS Proxy), lock contention, and logical replication and slot hygiene. • Review schema changes and DDL from backend teams for lock behavior, migration safety, and performance impact, and build the guardrails and tooling that make safe changes to the default path. • Own backup, restore, and disaster recovery end-to-end, including rehearsed restore drills and the access, encryption, and auditing controls our compliance obligations require. • Model database capacity and cost (I/O-Optimized vs. Standard, Serverless v2 sizing, read replica strategy) and drive cost-efficiency without compromising reliability. Infrastructure and automation (approx. 40%) • Del