Database Platform Engineer

Role Overview

As a Database Engineer at Mercor, you’ll own the performance, scalability, and reliability of our production database systems (primarily Amazon RDS for MySQL). You’ll work closely with backend engineers, infrastructure teams, and data stakeholders to ensure our systems are robust enough to handle rapid growth, and efficient enough to keep costs under control.

What You’ll Do

• Design, scale, and maintain our production RDS clusters for high availability and performance.

• Tune queries, indexes, and schema to support low-latency workloads at scale.

• Own the observability including the monitoring, alerting, and performance dashboards for database health.

• Manage backups, restores, failovers, and disaster recovery procedures.

• Work with engineers to optimize data models, migrations, and query patterns.

• Introduce automation for routine tasks (e.g., patching, scaling, parameter tuning).

• Ensure security best practices (IAM roles, encryption, auditing, least-privilege access).

• Partner with product & infra teams to plan for capacity growth and major launches.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience managing production relational databases (MySQL).

• Strong SQL skills and hands-on experience with query optimization & index tuning.

• Experience with Amazon RDS (parameter groups, Multi-AZ, read replicas, Aurora)

• Solid understanding of database internals (transaction isolation, locking, replication).

• Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform) is a plus.

• Comfort working with monitoring tools (CloudWatch, Datadog).

• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills; ability to deep dive into performance issues.

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work cross-functionally.

Nice to Have

• Experience with document storage systems (MongoDB)

• Experience with caching systems (Redis, ElastiCache).

• Exposure to data warehousing (Snowflake).

• Knowledge of security and compliance frameworks (SOC2, GDPR).

• Previous work in a high-growth startup environment.

We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.