Principal Database Reliability Engineer

Team: Information Technology

Location: US-MA-Natick

Salary Range: USD 231,400 - 144,600

Job Summary

MathWorks has a hybrid work model that enables staff members to split their time between office and home. The hybrid model provides the advantage of having both in-person time with colleagues and flexible at-home life optimizations. Learn More: https://www.mathworks.com/company/jobs/resources/applying-and-interviewing.html#onboarding.

As a Principal Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE), you will serve as the senior individual-contributor technical leader for the reliability and evolution of MathWorks' business-critical database platforms. You will establish technical direction, engineering standards, and multi-year strategy for Microsoft SQL Server and related database services, with accountability for availability, performance, scalability, recoverability, security, and operational excellence. Working across Site Reliability Engineering, application engineering, cloud, infrastructure, and security teams, you will lead the resolution of the most complex database challenges and influence architecture and investment decisions across the organization.

MathWorks nurtures growth, appreciates inclusivity, encourages initiative, values teamwork, shares success, and rewards excellence.

Responsibilities

• Database Reliability & Operational Ownership - Own the technical strategy and reliability posture of production database platforms supporting critical business applications. Establish service-level objectives, availability and recovery standards, capacity strategies, and operational readiness requirements. Lead the diagnosis and resolution of the highest-impact incidents and systemic performance issues, ensuring that lessons learned result in durable engineering improvements.
• Engineering, Automation & Platform Enablement - Set the engineering direction for database automation and self-service capabilities. Design and guide implementation of Infrastructure as Code, provisioning workflows, observability, CI/CD integrations, and operational tooling that reduce manual effort, improve consistency, and allow database services to scale safely across teams.
• Architecture, Modernization & Cloud Strategy - Serve as the principal database authority in application, platform, and cloud architecture decisions. Define reference architectures and technology standards; evaluate cloud-native and managed database services; and lead complex modernization initiatives across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. Balance reliability, security, performance, cost, and organizational readiness in major technical decisions.
• Security, Governance & Risk Management - Establish secure-by-default database patterns in partnership with security, risk, and compliance teams. Provide technical leadership for privileged access, encryption, auditing, backup and recovery, resilience testing, data protection, and lifecycle management. Identify systemic risks, prioritize remediation, and ensure controls are practical, testable, and consistently implemented.
• Technical Leadership & Organizational Influence - Act as a trusted principal engineer and escalation point across IT Platform Engineering and partner teams. Lead cross-team technical initiatives, facilitate architecture decisions and incident reviews, mentor senior engineers, and raise engineering standards through documentation, design reviews, and knowledge sharing. Build alignment across organizational boundaries without relying on direct authority.

Minimum Qualifications

• A bachelor's degree and 10 years of professional work experience (or equivalent experience) is required.

Additional Qualifications

• Expert-level Microsoft SQL Server experience in business-critical production environments, including performance tuning, high availability, disaster recovery, security, upgrades, and lifecycle management.
• Proven ability to share hands-on ownership of enterprise database platforms as one of two DBREs, independently resolving complex incidents and balancing reliability, performance, scalability, and operational priorities.
• Strong automation and platform-engineering skills using Infrastructure as Code, scripting or programming, source control, APIs, testing, and CI/CD to reduce operational toil and improve service consistency.
• Experience designing and modernizing resilient database architectures across on-premises, hybrid, and public-cloud environments.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and cross-team influence, including guiding architecture decisions, driving operational improvements, and collaborating effectively with application, SRE, cloud, infrastructure, and security teams.