Cloud Database Engineer

ABOUT US

ActBlue is a nonprofit that builds tech and infrastructure for Democratic campaigns, progressive-aligned causes, and people trying to make an impact in order to fuel long-term, people-powered change. If you’ve ever given online to a Democrat or progressive organization, chances are you’ve used our powerful online fundraising platform.

We put power in the hands of small-dollar donors and help thousands of groups — from presidential candidates to environmental organizations — build grassroots movements. We envision a democracy where everyone looking to make progressive people-powered change can easily and effectively deploy their resources, energy, and creativity to shape our country and futures. Each and every one of us, from the political activists to the tech innovators to the customer service pros, is fully committed to our mission.

THE OPPORTUNITY: 

We are seeking a Cloud Database Engineer who is passionate about database automation and building great tools in a security-conscious environment. In this role, you will develop and execute long-term strategy around the design and implementation of database architectures that support business requirements and achieve high performance, availability, and security.

We offer autonomy, responsibility, and amazing colleagues geeking out about politics and tech all day.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• Develop and execute long-term strategy around the design and implementation of database architectures that support business requirements and achieve high performance, availability, and security.

• Work with product, platform, and data teams to identify, mitigate, resolve and/or circumvent performance issues related to product features the organization prioritizes.

• Collaborate with development teams to optimize database code in application layers.

• Conduct performance tuning and testing of database systems, including queries, stored procedures, and indexing strategies.

• Implement automation of database installation, configuration, and maintenance.

• Develop and implement database backup, recovery, and failover procedures.

• Assist in the design and development of data models and database solutions.

• Provide guidance on database best practices to engineers and other stakeholders; inform the development or augmentation of processes related to said practices.

• Ensure database infrastructure is up-to-date with the latest technology trends and security patches.

• Develop and maintain documentation regarding database configurations, architectures, and procedures.

• Serve as the point of contact for database-related queries and technical support.

• Learn from alerts. After an event, we learn from it, continuously improving our infrastructure, monitoring, or applications to keep the same issue from ringing alarms again.

• Build visualizations of our data to understand the performance of our systems and recommend improvements to remove bottlenecks and points of failure.

• Anticipate and proactively address security concerns from both process and technology standpoints.

• Participate in the incident response (on-call) rotation.

WHAT YOU'LL BE WORKING WITH:

• Stack: Kubernetes, Docker, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Node.js, Redis

• Tooling:  Terraform, Jenkins

• Hosting: AWS (RDS and Aurora)

• Monitoring: DataDog

• Databases: RDS and containerized (mostly PostgreSQL)

WHAT YOU'LL BRING:

• Extensive experience in doing integration testing across large applications to ensure data integrity across multiple systems.

• Experience automating database administration tasks.

• Experience managing databases in a high volume, mission-critical environment, to include:

• Correctly optimizing for OLTP vs. OLAP traffic

• Mature database scaling techniques (sharding, partitioning, etc.)

• Extraction of business logic into application layers

• Experience with database scaling, replication, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

• Knowledge of and a passion for repeatable configuration management using IaC and good software engineering practices

• Knowledge of AWS and big data solutions (Redshift, EMR, etc.)

• Knowledge of database administration

• An allergy to manual processes

• Extremely valuable, but not required: Experience scaling a Rails monolith application, with attention to both the technical and cultural aspects