Database Engineer

As with all teams in EE, we closely collaborate with the departmental teams that provide the platform’s surrounding and centralised services (CI/CD system, observability tools and our internal runtime platforms) and so with all the product development teams within Springer Nature.  

Your responsibility 

Together with the team, you will share the responsibility of maintenance tasks, documentation, running updates and keeping our systems secure. 

Along with your team members, you provide expert services and guidance to development and product teams across Springer Nature and further develop our database infrastructure platform. 

You will contribute to the evolution of our database services through leveraging IaC, maximising customer self-service and living the continuous integration mindset. You help to improve and optimise the existing database platform to maximise capacity for consultation with internal customers. 

As one of the database experts for relational and document-store dbs, you help your customers to choose the best solution for their needs, providing advice and guidance on schema setup and query tuning.  

Key Tasks: 

• Maintaining and improving the database systems in production and development environments. 

• Provisioning, configuring, patching, upgrading, and maintaining databases. 

• Automating the management of new and existing databases to ensure that processes are repeatable and scalable. 

• Ensuring high availability of databases through clustering, replication, and other techniques. 

• Taking an active role in supporting and in finding the root cause of operational issues and preventing recurrences. 

• Contributing to our managed database platform, and working processes, which we use as a foundation for providing our services to the rest of the company. 

• Working with the team to document processes, procedures, and technical designs related to database management. 

• Monitoring and optimising database performance, including configuration, resource usage and query tuning.  

• Taking an active role in collaborating across the engineering department on database related topics and integrations. 

• Working with colleagues, internal customers and stakeholders on new features and capabilities. 

You will have the opportunity to work on new challenges and drive the evolution of our services in a collaborative and supportive environment. 

About you 

Desired Skills and Experience: 

• Knowledge and experience of MongoDB and PostgreSQL 

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, for automation and configuration management 

• Programming experience with Golang, Ruby, Python or at least one modern language 

• Experience in operating and maintaining cloud infrastructure 

• Experience with automation frameworks (e.g. Terraform, Puppet or Ansible) 

• Understanding of database architecture, backup and recovery, and performance tuning  

• Experience with database clustering and replication mechanisms. 

Preferred Skills and Experience:  

• Experience of working with Cloud SQL 

• Experience using Google Cloud Platform 

• Experience of using (and ideally developing) REST APIs 

• Experience of developing web applications 

• Experience with common CI/CD tools 

• Docker and containerisation 

• Experience in contributing to the architecture and design of new and existing systems 

• Unix shell scripting or programming experience 

• High user and customer orientation 

• High sensitivity for security-relevant issues 

• Strong conceptual skills, logical/analytical thinking & problem-solving skills 

We are looking forward to your application. After reviewing your CV our Talent Acquisition team will contact you to schedule a short initial phone/video call. After getting this first step we will run 2-3 rounds (introductory, technical, cultural) with you - all of these with different members of the Engineering Enablement team. When appropriate these phases will be held via phone /video calls.   

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