Senior Database Operations Engineer

About the role

Crunchyroll is growing and changing, presenting unique challenges and opportunities to support millions of anime fans around the world. The Data Engineering team provides seamless help to our internal stakeholders, ensuring an exceptional experience for all Crunchyroll fans.

As a Database Engineer for the Data Engineering team, you will be responsible for maintaining and enhancing the reliability of our data infrastructure. Your work will directly impact the availability and performance of our data services, enabling the organization to make data-driven decisions. You will collaborate closely with data engineers, and software engineers to develop and drive 100% automation, best practices for deep monitoring and alerting.

Core Areas of Responsibility

• Database Strategy & Technical Leadership: Act as the strategic subject matter expert for database engine best practices, storage engines, and long-term data placement strategy across the broader engineering organization. Partner with tech leadership to raise the collective database expertise of the team.
• SQL Optimization & Application Performance: Drive deep application performance analysis. Own the identification, debugging, and elimination of query execution bottlenecks, optimizing raw SQL, missing indexes, execution plans, and data models to maximize throughput and minimize latency.
• Cloud Database Architecture & Scale: Design, scale, and evaluate schemas leveraging AWS-native database services, including Amazon RDS, Aurora (MySQL/PostgreSQL), and NoSQL engines (DynamoDB), ensuring systems adhere strictly to rigorous scalability benchmarks.
• Database Internals & Systems Analysis: Execute deep-dive performance forensics into database engine behaviors, memory structures, replication lag, locking mechanisms, and OS/hardware saturation metrics (such as Disk/IO performance) to preemptively address platform degradation.
• Engineering Mentorship & Advisory: Partner closely with internal application development and data teams to review data access patterns, optimize application-level database interaction layers, and establish organizational standards around indexing and schema configurations.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Database SRE specialists to ensure highly optimized query layouts, correct database configuration and schemas translate seamlessly into platform automation and IaC frameworks.

About You

We get excited about candidates, like you, because...

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in database operations, or a related role with a focus on data platforms, data stores, data operations.
• Deep experience in AWS RDS, Aurora and NoSQL is a must.
• Extensive experience with AWS cloud platform and their data-related services.
• Proficiency in monitoring tools (e.g., Datadog, CloudWatch, DevOps Guru, DB Performance Insights).
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g.  Python, Java)
• Strong understanding of various performance metrics both at a high level and at a low level like Disk/IO saturation.
• Experience in identifying an