The Role

This role is a Software Engineering position on the QSS team at Outreach. The QSS team is responsible for writing software to automate the management of and provide critical support for all stateful systems that the Outreach Engineers use to build their services. In this capacity, the QSS team engineers or DBREs are peers to the other SRE teams and bring stateful experience to the SRE and product engineering teams.

About the Team

As a small team, QSS team engineers are providing tools and services for managing stateful systems as well as providing guidelines and best practices for how these stateful systems are used at Outreach. The DBRE’s purview includes RDBMS systems, Queues, NoSQL and Object storage. These systems are mostly managed systems in AWS - RDS, ElasticCache, etc - along with self hosted services - Rabbit, Kafka, etc. With the continued growth of Outreach it’s critical that we automate the provisioning and management of these systems. We are looking to grow the team with experienced software engineers with deep technical knowledge of managing databases and queues at scale in a production environment. 

You should join our team if you have an interest in developing software to manage Kafka, MySQL, PostgreSQL and other similar systems at scale. 

Your Daily Adventures Will Include

• Ensure database reliability and performance aspects for Outreach.io from within the SRE team as well as across teams as needed.
• Write software to automate Outreach's database infrastructure and contribute to Outreach's scalability. 
• Ensure database reliability and performance aspects for Outreach.io from within the SRE team as well as across teams as needed.
• Tackle the automation of stateful infrastructure and help engineering succeed by providing self-service tools.
• Develop tools to allow Production Engineers provision resources for their services
• Analyze solutions and implement best practices for our database clusters and other stateful components.
• Develop solutions for migrating data between systems.
• Provide database expertise to engineering teams (for example through reviews of database migrations, queries and performance optimizations).
• Work with peer SREs to roll out changes to our production environment and help mitigate database-related production incidents.
• OnCall support on rotation within the SRE organization.
• Support and debug database production issues across services and levels of the stack.
• Proactively configure monitors and alerts to alert on symptoms and not on outages.
• Document every action so your learnings turn into repeatable actions and then into automation.




We encourage you to apply, even if you’re unsure whether you're the perfect fit. We can't currently support early career DBRE’s, but if you're an experienced software developer interested in the DBRE/infrastructure space, we can support you in the transition.

Our Vision of You

• Programming experience in a high level language like Go, Java, NodeJS
• Demonstrated ability to implement proper test coverage
• Understanding of microservice architecture and best practices
• Infrastructure as code with tools like terraform, chef, and cloud formation
• Experience with database performance analysis in either MySQL or PostgreSQL
• Experience with NoSQL datastores like DynamoDB or Cassandra
• Experience coaching and mentoring junior engineers
• Experience in disaster recovery planning and execution
• Knowledge of Cloud native architecture
• Experience with running Containers in production environments
• Nice to have: Familiarity with running Kafka in production environments under heavy load

Why You’ll Love It Here

• Generous medical, dental, and vision coverage for full-time employees and their dependents

• Flexible time off

• 401k to help you save for the future

• Company-organized and personal paid volunteer days to support the community that supports us

• Fun company and team outings (or virtual events these days!) because we play just as hard as we work

• Diversity and inclusion programs that promote employee resource groups like OWN (Outreach Womxn's Network)

• A parental leave program that includes not just extended time off but options for a paid night nurse, food delivery, gradual return to work, and the Gottman Institute's Bringing Home Baby course for new parents

• Employee referral bonuses to encourage the addition of great new people to the team

• Plus, unlimited snacks and beverages in our kitchen (once we're back in the office, that is!)

• We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status