Database Reliability Engineer

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Remote
Posted Nov 6, 2026
1 position

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Employment type: Contract
Experience level: 5+ years
Posting language: English
Application method: Apply on LinkedIn (LinkedIn sign-in required)

Job summary

Operate and maintain production Cassandra environments, including capacity planning, backups, recovery, replication, upgrades, repairs, compaction, and performance tuning. Design and review data models and query patterns, and respond to production incidents through investigation and root-cause analysis.

Job details

Role: Database Reliability Engineer - Cassandra Location: Toronto, ON Canada (Remote) Minimum Qualifications: 5+ years of experience running Apache Cassandra in large-scale production or SaaS environments. Solid understanding of distributed database systems internals, including replication and consistency levels, partitioning and token distribution, compaction, tombstones, and the read and write paths. Demonstrated production Apache Cassandra experience with: Capacity planning. Backup and recovery. Replication, multi-datacenter topologies, and high availability. Major-version upgrades. Repair, compaction, and performance tuning. Data modeling and partition key design, and reviewing query patterns for production impact. Incident response and root-cause analysis for customer-facing production systems. Experience working with cross-functional engineering teams. Ability to participate in on-call rotations and scheduled maintenance windows. Fluency in English, both oral and written. Preferred Qualifications Experience with: Operating Apache Cassandra at scale. Designing data models that avoid hotspots and unbounded partitions for high-volume workloads. Zero- or near-zero-downtime operations on production clusters, including node replacement, scaling, and cross-cluster migrations. Zero- or near-zero-downtime major-version upgrades of Apache Cassandra. Running Apache Cassandra in Kubernetes or other containerized environments. Amazon Keyspaces (managed Apache Cassandra), including data modeling, capacity configuration, and how it differs from running Cassandra yourself. Amazon Aurora (managed PostgreSQL), including data modeling, capacity configuration, and how it differs from running PostgreSQL yourself. YugabyteDB. Linux OS fundamentals. CI/CD and GitOps tools such as Jenkins and ArgoCD. Infrastructure-as-code and configuration management using Ansible. Building automation, tooling, or services used in production using Python. Observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or OpenTelemetry.

What you’ll do

Requirements

Requires at least five years of experience running Apache Cassandra in large-scale production or SaaS environments, with strong knowledge of distributed database internals and hands-on operational practices. Candidates must collaborate across engineering teams, participate in on-call rotations and maintenance windows, and communicate fluently in English.