Job Summary:
The Database Engineering Manager will lead Clearwater’s database engineering organization, driving reliability, modernization, performance, governance, and automation across cloud-native environments. This role is responsible for guiding the strategic evolution of our database platforms, supporting mission-critical workloads, and ensuring our data systems achieve the highest standards of availability, scalability, security, and compliance.
You will oversee a dedicated team managing the 24/7 performance of databases that power our transaction processing, reporting, and reconciliation services. The ideal candidate combines deep database engineering expertise—especially in SQL Server—with modern cloud platform experience and a passion for building high-performing teams.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and own the strategy, architecture, and long-term roadmap for Clearwater’s database platforms across on-premises and cloud environments.
- Lead modernization initiatives, including migration to cloud native or managed database services and adoption of IaC based automation.‑native or managed database services and adoption of metadata‑driven or ‑based automation.
- Drive standards for performance optimization, scalability, observability, and governance across all database environments.
- Oversee system health, incident response, performance tuning, and real-time monitoring for high-volume, low latency workloads.‑time monitoring for high‑volume, low‑latency workloads.
- Ensure SLAs, SLOs, RTO/RPO, and compliance requirements are consistently met.
- Streamline deployments, backups, patching, failovers, and capacity scaling through automation.
- Partner with software engineering, SRE, analytics, cloud platform, and security teams to ensure alignment with business and technical objectives.
- Serve as a senior escalation point for performance, reliability, and architectural issues.
- Collaborate with stakeholders on prioritization, planning, risk management, and delivery commitments.
- Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing database engineering team. Oversee recruitment, career development, performance management, and succession planning.
- Foster a collaborative, results driven engineering culture consistent with Clearwater values.‑driven engineering culture consistent with Clearwater values.
Required Qualifications
- 12+ years of experience in production database engineering, with deep technical expertise in SQL Server (performance tuning, indexing, high availability/disaster recovery, query optimization).
- 5+ years in engineering leadership, managing and developing technical teams.
- Hands-on experience with modern cloud database platforms (AWS RDS, Aurora, Azure SQL, or similar).
- Expertise in real-time and batch data processing, pipelines, and modern data architecture.
- Strong knowledge of governance, compliance, observability, and cost optimization principles.
- Exceptional communication skills, including clear written, verbal, and incident communications.
- Proven track record of delivering complex technical initiatives under pressure.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Snowflake, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, or other cloud native and nonrelational platforms.‑native and non‑relational platforms.
- Experience supporting largescale, high throughput transactional workloads.‑scale, high‑throughput transactional workloads.
- Hands‑on automation using Terraform, CloudFormation, PowerShell, or similar IaC tools.
- Exposure to data streaming or CDC based ingestion (Kafka, Qlik, etc.).‑based ingestion (Kafka, Qlik, etc.).
- Certifications: AWS Database Specialty, Microsoft SQL Server/Azure DBA, or equivalent.
