Database Engineer

Overview

Database Engineer

Building services that enable others

Springer Nature is one of the world’s leading global research, educational and professional publishers. It is home to an array of respected and trusted brands and imprints, with more than 170 years of combined history behind them, providing quality content through a range of innovative products and services. Every day, around the globe, our imprints, books, journals and resources reach millions of people, helping researchers and scientists to discover, students to learn and professionals to achieve their goals and ambitions. The company has around 10,000 staff in over 50 countries.

We’re looking for an experienced Database Engineer, with an IaC mindset, who will help us fulfil our mission to enable product teams to focus on delivering value.

About us: Engineering Enablement

The Engineering Enablement (EE) department consists of around 60 people, spread over teams that closely collaborate to fulfil our mission. In Springer Nature Technology (SNT) we serve different core expertise: PaaS, Databases, Observability and Cloud- and Release Engineering. You will join a multidisciplinary team with different nationalities, backgrounds and experience levels. We are a very distributed department but sometimes we travel to work with each other in person. We are based around the globe with main locations in London, Dordrecht, Berlin, Lisbon and New York.

Our Technology

We have built platforms serving hundreds of developers at scale around the world. We are making more and more use of Kubernetes as a backend container platform and integrating this into our platform offering. We are leveraging the power of Kubernetes to build a new PaaS that will co-exist with the current Cloud Foundry Platform, as well as managing an internal database platform that runs over 1,200 database servers.

Your team

This role is within the Database Engineering team, who are responsible for providing our managed database platform.

The team consists of Platform Engineers and Database Engineers who work together to provide managed database services – and the underlying cloud-based infrastructure – for internal customers across the organisation.

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

You are a friendly team member who is modest, humble and open to learning from anyone regardless of age, gender, race, role or experience. You value social interactions, are open to feedback and introspection and you can self-reflect by asking questions.

You are confident in your abilities but aware of your limitations. You have a strong preference for working together, collaborating across domains and practices, sharing knowledge and training others as opposed to quickly getting things done alone. You understand the value of doing meaningful and sustainable work rather than implementing temporary fixes to meet arbitrary deadlines.

Skills and Experience

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.