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At Handshakes, we are committed to delivering innovative and robust cloud-based solutions that drive our business forward.

We are looking for an experienced Database Reliability Engineer to join our Platforms Engineering team at our Kuala Lumpur office.

In this role, you will own the health, performance, and resilience of our production database estate, working closely with Platforms Engineering and Product Engineering to keep critical data systems fast, available, and secure.

This is a hands-on operations role for someone with strong DBA fundamentals who is equally comfortable navigating cloud infrastructure and troubleshooting connectivity, health checks, and system-level issues.

Responsibilities:

• Database Performance & Optimisation: Write, review, and optimise SQL queries; identify long-running or resource-intensive queries and work with engineering teams to resolve them.
• Reliability Operations & On-Call: Monitor database health, connectivity, and system-level metrics across production environments, participating in on-call rotation to proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact users.
• Performance Monitoring: Run regular performance checks and capacity reviews on AWS RDS instances, using native tooling (Performance Insights, CloudWatch) to track query and resource trends over time.
• Database Design & Recommendations: Review database schema and query design, and propose recommendations to improve indexing, query efficiency, and overall database performance.
• Upgrades & Migrations: Plan and execute database version upgrades, patching, and migrations (including cross-engine or cross-environment migrations) with minimal downtime and clear rollback plans.
• Backup & Restoration: Own backup strategy, retention, and restoration testing across managed database services, ensuring recovery objectives (RPO/RTO) are consistently met.
• Infrastructure as Code: Write and maintain IaC (e.g. Terraform, CDKTF) to provision and manage database infrastructure such as RDS instances, parameter groups, and DynamoDB tables.
• Schema Change Management: Own version-controlled schema migrations, ensuring changes are reviewed, auditable, and reversible, with clear documentation and change records.
• Cost & Capacity Management: Monitor database costs and capacity utilisation, recommending right-sizing, storage autoscaling, and reserved capacity purchases where appropriate.
• Cloud & Systems Troubleshooting: Navigate AWS infrastructure to diagnose issues spanning networking, connectivity, IAM permissions, and compute, beyond the database layer itself.
• Collaboration: Work closely with Platforms Engineering, Product Engineering, and Security teams to align database operations with broader platform reliability and governance goals.

Required Skills & Experience:

• Experience: 5–7 years of experience in a Database Administrator, Database Reliability Engineer, or similar role supporting production systems.
• SQL Proficiency: Strong hands-on ability to write, review, and optimise complex SQL queries across relational database engines.
• AWS Database Services: Deep, hands-on expertise with AWS RDS (MSSQL) — including query tuning, indexing, replication, and patching — plus working-level proficiency with DocumentDB and DynamoDB (data modeling, throughput/partition design, and troubleshooting) and S3 for backup and data storage. Comfortable ramping up quickly on an unfamiliar engine using AWS-native tooling.
• Performance Tuning: Demonstrated experience identifying long-running queries, tuning indexes, and improving query execution plans.
• Backup & Recovery: Practical experience designing and testing backup, restoration, and disaster recovery procedures for production databases.
• Migrations & Upgrades: Experience planning and executing database upgrades and migrations, including assessing compatibility and minimising downtime.
• Infrastructure as Code: Working knowledge of IaC tools (e.g. Terraform, CDKTF, or CloudFormation), with hands-on ability to write or modify code to provision database infrastructure.
• Schema Change Management: Familiarity with version-controlled schema migration practices, ensuring database changes are tracked, reviewed, and reversible.
• Cloud & Systems Fundamentals: Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure fundamentals — connectivity, networking, health checks, and basic troubleshooting — beyond the database layer.
• Database Design: Understanding of relational and NoSQL database design principles, with the ability to recommend schema or indexing improvements.
• Communication: Ability to clearly document findings, recommendations, and incident write-ups for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice-to-Have:

• Broader IaC experience across platform infrastructure (not limited to databases), contributing to shared Terraform/CDKTF modules.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Datadog, CloudWatch, or Prometheus/Grafana for database and system metrics.
• Familiarity with data governance, security, or compliance frameworks (e.g. ISO 27001) relevant to database and data handling practices.

Why Join Us:

• Own a critical part of the platform’s reliability, with direct impact on system performance and customer experience.
• Work across a modern AWS-based data stack spanning relational, document, and key-value database services.
• Be part of a dynamic, innovative, and growth-focused engineering team.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and a collaborative work environment.

If you are a detail-oriented database professional who enjoys keeping critical systems fast, reliable, and well-governed, we would love to hear from you!

** We offer hybrid working arrangement subject to company policy.

In order to ensure that your candidature is considered, please send your profile or inquiries directly to *************