Role Overview
As a Senior Data Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, building, and operating data platforms that rely on Amazon Aurora MySQL as a core data store. Being a part of the Data Engineering Team, you will work closely with application, infrastructure, and security teams to ensure database platforms are scalable, performant, secure, highly available, and compliant.
This role requires strong hands-on Aurora MySQL expertise along with end-to-end ownership of database-centric data engineering solutions, supporting application workloads, analytics consumption, operational reporting, and emerging AI-driven use cases.
Key Responsibilities
Aurora MySQL Administration - Own the design, implementation, and operation of Amazon Aurora MySQL databases supporting data engineering and application workloads.
- Define, review, and evolve database schemas, indexing strategies, partitioning approaches, and access patterns optimized for performance and downstream consumption.
- Be accountable for database lifecycle activities including provisioning, upgrades, patching, backups, failover validation, and high availability.
- Ensure consistent standards and configurations across non-Prod and Prod environments.
Performance, Reliability & Scalability - Take responsibility for Aurora MySQL performance tuning, including slow query analysis, execution plan review, indexing, schema optimization, and connection management.
- Monitor database health, replication lag, storage growth, capacity trends, and workload patterns, and proactively drive scaling and optimization activities.
- Design, validate, and maintain high-availability and disaster-recovery strategies using native Aurora capabilities, including reader instances, failover, backups, snapshots, and cross-region patterns where applicable.
- Support sharded or large-scale Aurora MySQL environments by driving capacity planning, performance improvements, and operational readiness.
Security, Governance & Compliance - Own implementation of secure, least-privilege access models and role-based controls for Aurora MySQL database access.
- Enable and maintain audit logging, database activity monitoring, and integrations with centralized SOC and observability platforms.
- Ensure databases comply with organizational security standards and regulatory requirements such as GDPR, SOC, and PCI where applicable.
- Act as a key technical contributor during SOC reviews, audits, security investigations, and access control reviews.
Data Engineering Enablement - Work to support and optimize ETL/ELT pipelines, batch workloads, and near-real-time ingestion patterns that interact with Aurora MySQL.
- Provide guidance on schema design, query patterns, data access strategies, and performance best practices for application and analytics teams.
- Support integrations with platforms such as AWS Glue, HVR, Databricks, S3-based data pipelines, and analytics tools.
Automation & Operational Excellence - Drive automation of routine operational and database tasks using scripts, AWS-native services, Infrastructure-as-Code, CI/CD practices, and AI-assisted tools.
- Own troubleshooting and resolution of complex data platform issues, including production incidents, performance degradations, connectivity issues, replication concerns, and on-call support.
- Create, maintain, and continuously improve runbooks, SOPs, plans of action, operational checklists, and database support documentation.
Key Metrics for the Role - Maintain high database availability, with target uptime of 99.9% or higher for supported Aurora MySQL production workloads.
- Reduce production incidents and escalations through proactive monitoring, performance tuning, capacity planning, and operational readiness reviews.
- Improve database performance by tracking query latency, slow queries, read/write throughput, connection utilization, replication lag, and storage growth trends.
- Ensure backup, restore, failover, and DR readiness by validating RPO/RTO targets and completing periodic recovery and failover testing.
- Support timely completion of Aurora MySQL upgrades, patching, security hardening, TLS enablement, IAM-based access, and audit/compliance requirements.
- Increase automation coverage for repetitive database operations, validation checks, user management, monitoring, and deployment workflows.
- Contribute to cost optimization by identifying right-sizing opportunities, redundant resources, unused snapshots, and reserved-instance or Graviton migration opportunities.
- Maintain high-quality operational documentation, including SOPs, runbooks, deployment checklists, rollback plans, and production support playbooks.
Must-Have Skills - 6+ years of strong experience as a Senior Data Engineer or Database Engineer with deep hands-on expertise in Amazon Aurora MySQL.
- Advanced MySQL knowledge, including query optimization, indexing, execution plans, transactions, replication concepts, partitioning, and storage engine behavior.
- Experience owning and supporting data-intensive Aurora MySQL platforms in production environments.
- Solid understanding of AWS services related to data platforms, including Aurora/RDS, IAM, CloudWatch, S3, AWS Glue, and backup/restore capabilities.
- Proven ability to independently troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues across database, application, and infrastructure layers.
Good-to-Have Skills - Experience with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, MongoDB Atlas, or AWS DynamoDB.
- Familiarity with Databricks or similar analytics/lakehouse platforms.
- Understanding of modern data engineering patterns, including ETL/ELT, batch processing, near-real-time data movement, and streaming concepts.
- Knowledge of AI/ML concepts and practical use of AI-assisted tools for operational efficiency.
- Experience in regulated industries such as fintech, payments, banking, or financial services.
Preferred Qualifications - Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
- Exposure to CI/CD practices for database deployments, schema changes, and data platform operations.
- AWS certifications related to data, database, solutions architecture, or cloud operations.
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