Senior Database Engineer (UK Remote)

When you join Turnitin, you'll be welcomed into a company that is a recognized innovator in the global education space. For more than 25 years, Turnitin has partnered with educational institutions to promote honesty, consistency, and fairness across all subject areas and assessment types. Turnitin products are used by educational institutions and certification and licensing programs to uphold integrity and increase learning performance, and by students and professionals to do their best, original work.

Experience a remote-first culture that empowers you to work with purpose and accountability in a way that best suits you, supported by a comprehensive package that prioritises your overall well-being. Our diverse community of colleagues are all unified by a shared desire to make a difference in education. Turnitin is a global organization with team members in over 35 countries including the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, India, and the Philippines.

We are seeking a Senior Database Engineer with deep expertise in PostgreSQL and AWS Aurora to join our global infrastructure team. You will own the reliability, performance, and scalability of the database platforms that support Turnitin’s educational technology services. This role combines strategic project delivery with hands-on operational support in a fast-moving, highly available production environment. The successful candidate operates with a high degree of autonomy, drives work to completion with minimal oversight, and collaborates effectively with teammates across multiple time zones.

Responsibilities:

• Own the reliability, performance, and day-to-day operation of production database platforms, balancing project delivery with operational support.
• Design and evolve highly available database architectures in AWS to meet uptime, latency, scalability, and recoverability goals.
• Lead database lifecycle activities, including provisioning, upgrades, migrations, backup/restore processes, and disaster recovery readiness.
• Drive performance improvements by investigating production issues, identifying root causes, and implementing durable solutions in partnership with application and infrastructure teams.
• Establish and maintain operational excellence: monitoring, alerting, runbooks, documentation, and incident response practices.
• Define and enforce database security standards, access controls, and auditing aligned with internal policies and compliance requirements.
• Automate repeatable operational tasks and standardise infrastructure delivery using Infrastructure as Code and scripting.
• Perform capacity planning and cost optimization; provide recommendations based on observed workload trends and business growth.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and lead/participate in post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence.
• Collaborate with a globally distributed team, including regular attendance at meetings multiple times per week within the 16:00–19:00 GMT time range.

Qualifications Requirements:

• Established senior-level experience (8+ years) in production database engineering/administration, with deep hands-on expertise in PostgreSQL.
• Demonstrated ability to operate autonomously: independently identify priorities, drive complex work to completion, and act as an escalation point for database-related incidents with minimal oversight.
• Strong PostgreSQL expertise, including performance tuning and troubleshooting using execution plans, indexing strategy, concurrency/locking concepts, and database statistics.
• Strong AWS database experience with Aurora PostgreSQL/RDS, including high availability design, backups/snapshots, point-in-time recovery, and IAM-based access patterns.
• Proven experience implementing and operating connection pooling/connection management in production using PgBouncer and/or RDS Proxy.
• Experience designing and testing backup/restore and disaster recovery processes, with a practical understanding of RPO/RTO and restore validation.
• Hands-on Infrastructure as Code experience for database platforms, specifically Terraform (modules, state management, safe change control).
• Demonstrated observability experience using Prometheus and Grafana, including building actionable dashboards and reducing alert noise.
• Experience operating at least one non-relational data store in production (e.g., Redis and/or DynamoDB) as part of a broader platform.
• Strong Linux fundamentals relevant to database operations (system performance, storage, troubleshooting).
• Proficiency in scripting/automation using Python and/or other languages to reduce manual work and improve operational consistency.
• Strong written communication skills, including the ability to produce clear runbooks, change plans, and incident summaries for a global audience.
• Comfort collaborating asynchronously across time zones and working in a fast-changing environment with frequent production changes.

Customer Centric - We realise our mission to ensure integrity and improve learning outcomes by putting educators and learners at the center of everything we do.

Passion for Learning - We seek out teammates that are constantly learning and growing and build a workplace which enables them to do so.

Action & Ownership - We have a bias toward action and empower teammates to make decisions.

One Team - We strive to break down silos, collaborate effectively, and celebrate each other's successes.

Global Mindset - We respect local cultures and embrace diversity. We think globally and act locally to maximize our impact on education.

Additional Information

Total Rewards @ Turnitin: At Turnitin, we believe Total Rewards go far beyond pay. While salary, bonus, or commission are important, they’re only part of the value you receive in exchange for your work. Beyond compensation, you’ll experience the intrinsic rewards of unleashing your potential and making a positive impact on global education. You’ll also thrive in a culture free of politics, surrounded by humble, inclusive, and collaborative teammates. In addition, our extrinsic rewards include generous time off and health and wellness programs that provide choice, flexibility, and a safety net for life’s challenges. You’ll also enjoy a remote-first culture that empowers you to work with purpose and accountability in the way that suits you best, all supported by a comprehensive package that prioritises your overall well-being.

Our Mission is to ensure the integrity of global education and meaningfully improve learning outcomes. Our Values underpin everything we do.

• Customer Centric: Our mission is focused on improving learning outcomes; we do this by putting educators and learners at the center of everything we do.
• Passion for Learning: We are committed to our own learning and growth internally. And we support education and learning around the globe.
• Integrity: Integrity is the heartbeat of Turnitin—it is the core of our products, the way we treat each other, and how we work with our customers and vendors.
• Action & Ownership: We have a bias for action. We act like owners. We are willing to change even when it’s hard.
• One Team: We strive to break down silos, collaborate effectively, and celebrate each other's successes.
• Global Mindset: We consider different perspectives and celebrate diversity. We are one team. The work we do has an impact on the world.

Remote First Culture

• Health Care Coverage
• Education Reimbursement
• Competitive Paid Time Off
• Self-Care Days
• National Holidays
• Charitable contribution match
• Monthly Wellness or Home Office Reimbursement
• Access to Modern Health (mental health platform)
• Retirement Plan with match/contribution (varies by country)

Seeing Beyond the Job Ad: At Turnitin, we recognize it’s unrealistic for candidates to fulfill 100% of the criteria in a job ad. We encourage you to apply if you meet the majority of the requirements because we know that skills evolve over time. If you’re willing to learn and unleash your potential alongside us, join our team!