{"id":2446645,"url":"https://alion.io/job/qualys-principal-database-reliability-engineer-2","title":"Principal Database Reliability Engineer","company":{"id":18966,"name":"Qualys","domain":"qualys.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/qualys","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":null},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Pune, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":26000,"max_usd":45000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":16},"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":false},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":false},{"name":"Oracle","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-13T13:46:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-13","last_verified_at":"2026-10-13T18:37:21Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Come work at a place where innovation and teamwork come together to support the most exciting missions in the world!\nPrincipal Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) - Enterprise Data Platform\nOpenSearch Anchor Expertise | Enterprise Architecture | Distributed Systems | Automation | Strategy\nLevel\nPrincipal DBRE\nDomain\nEnterprise Data Infrastructure and Multi-Paradigm Data Platforms\nPrimary Focus\nEnterprise technical direction anchored in OpenSearch, distributed-systems reliability, automation platforms, cross-domain architecture, and multi-year strategy\nWork Expectations\nU.S. Eastern Time business hours; on-call participation as required\n1. Role Summary\nWe are seeking a hands-on Principal DBRE to serve as the highest individual-contributor technical authority for enterprise data-platform reliability and architecture. OpenSearch/Elasticsearch is the required anchor expertise. The role also requires strong breadth across distributed and relational data technologies, automation, observability, capacity, resilience, and technology strategy.\nThe Principal DBRE defines multi-year direction, resolves consequential cross-domain architecture issues, establishes enterprise engineering principles, and influences senior engineering and executive leadership. The role guides domain specialists without requiring the individual to be the deepest expert in every database engine.\n2. Level Scope and Leadership Expectations\nPrincipal DBRE is an executive-adjacent individual-contributor technical leadership role. The Principal establishes enterprise direction across multiple platform domains, resolves the most consequential architecture and reliability problems, and creates standards and investment priorities that scale across the organization.\nDimension\nExpectation at This Level\nScope of Ownership\nShapes enterprise reliability, scalability, resilience, security, cost, and lifecycle direction across distributed and relational data-platform families.\nAnchor Technical Depth\nServes as a recognized authority in OpenSearch/Elasticsearch and distributed-systems architecture, with enough depth to lead the most consequential technical decisions.\nCross-Domain Breadth\nDemonstrates strong experience in at least two complementary domains such as Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, or Oracle, and can guide specialists across unfamiliar technologies.\nStrategic Leadership\nDefines multi-year architecture principles, technical roadmaps, production-readiness expectations, and investment priorities aligned with business needs.\nOrganizational Influence\nBuilds alignment across senior engineers, leaders, platform teams, and application organizations through clear tradeoffs, evidence, and measurable outcomes.\nPlatform Engineering\nChampions reusable automation, observability, governance, and self-service capabilities as enterprise platform products.\n3. Key Responsibilities\nA. Enterprise Data-Platform Architecture\nDefine enterprise architecture principles and target-state direction anchored in OpenSearch and distributed-systems reliability.\nGuide cross-domain decisions spanning search, streaming, caching, and relational services without displacing domain specialists.\nResolve architecture conflicts involving scalability, resilience, operability, security, cost, data movement, and lifecycle constraints.\nB. Reliability and Resilience Strategy\nEstablish enterprise production-readiness, SLI/SLO, backup, recovery, DR, capacity, lifecycle, and incident-learning principles.\nLead the technical response and systemic review for the most consequential multi-platform failures.\nTranslate recurring incidents and platform risks into architecture safeguards and prioritized investment roadmaps.\nC. Automation and Platform Engineering\nDefine the strategy for shared Python automation platforms, operational APIs/CLIs, CI/CD guardrails, validation frameworks, safe remediation, and Infrastructure as Code.\nPromote self-service and platform-as-a-product practices that reduce toil while preserving change safety and accountability.\nD. Technology Strategy and Organizational Influence\nLead workload-relevant evaluation of emerging technologies, including operability, failure behavior, migration risk, performance, and total cost.\nPartner with senior engineering and executive leadership on multi-year technical direction, platform investments, and modernization decisions.\nMentor Staff and Lead engineers, cultivate technical leadership, and improve architecture-review and decision-making quality.\n4. Required Qualifications and Experience\n12+ years of relevant database, DBRE, SRE, platform, or distributed-systems engineering experience with Principal, Staff, Lead, or comparable technical leadership responsibility.\nExpert-level OpenSearch and/or Elasticsearch architecture and production operations experience.\nStrong distributed-systems reasoning and meaningful production experience in at least two of Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, or Oracle.\nStrong software-engineering and automation capability, preferably Python-based platform tooling and APIs.\nProven ability to define multi-year technical direction, resolve cross-domain architecture problems, and influence senior engineering and executive stakeholders.\nDeep understanding of reliability, capacity, observability, lifecycle management, DR, security, and cost tradeoffs.\nExcellent written communication, technical judgment, mentorship, and organizational influence.\n5. Preferred Qualifications\nBreadth across both distributed and relational database technologies.\nKubernetes stateful platforms, cloud-managed data services, hybrid architectures, and Infrastructure as Code.\nExperience with ClickHouse, Pinot, vector databases, NewSQL, stream processing, or similar emerging technologies.\nExperience influencing vendors or open-source communities and guiding major modernization programs.\n6. Expected Outcomes in the First 6-12 Months\nDeliver an evidence-based enterprise data-platform architecture and reliability roadmap with clear priorities, ownership, and investment tradeoffs.\nEstablish measurable baselines and lead material improvements in cross-platform reliability, MTTR, capacity risk, operational toil, and recovery readiness.\nDefine and gain adoption of shared production-readiness, architecture-review, automation, and lifecycle-management principles.\nGuide at least one consequential platform modernization or technology decision from evaluation through an approved and supportable execution plan.\nDevelop Staff and Lead technical leadership and improve cross-organizational architecture decision quality.\n7. What This Role Does Not Include\nThis is not a people-management role unless separately assigned.\nThe Principal DBRE is not expected to be the deepest hands-on expert in every database technology; OpenSearch is the anchor expertise, supported by credible cross-domain breadth.\nThis role does not replace Staff, Lead, or domain-specific subject-matter experts and operational owners.\nThis role is not an executive approval authority; decisions are shaped through technical evidence, influence, and established governance.\nThis role does not personally own every incident, implementation task, or operational detail; it focuses on the highest-impact cross-domain problems and systemic outcomes.\n8. Work Expectations and Location\nThis role requires working during U.S. Eastern Time (ET) business hours and participating in on-call support as required.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7420,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":12,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Cloud Security","Security Compliance","Vulnerability Management"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-13T13:46:00Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":59,"reasons":["conf:6","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-14T01:03:30Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/qualys-principal-database-reliability-engineer-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/qualys-principal-database-reliability-engineer-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-14T01:03:30Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1601,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-15T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":18966},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=18966"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fqualys-principal-database-reliability-engineer-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fqualys-principal-database-reliability-engineer-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fqualys-principal-database-reliability-engineer-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/qualys-principal-database-reliability-engineer-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fqualys-principal-database-reliability-engineer-2"}]}