Database Reliability Engineer

Job Overview

Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) 

About Us:

Rent the Runway (RTR)  is transforming the way we get dressed by pioneering the world’s first Closet in the Cloud. Founded in 2009, RTR has disrupted the $2.4 trillion fashion industry by inspiring women with a more joyful, sustainable and financially-savvy way to feel their best every day. As the ultimate destination for circular fashion, the brand now offers infinite points of access to its shared closet via a fully customizable subscription to fashion, one-time rental or ownership. RTR offers designer apparel and accessories from hundreds of brand partners and has built in-house proprietary technology and a one-of-a-kind reverse logistics operation. Under CEO and Co-Founder Jennifer Hyman’s leadership, RTR has been named to CNBC’s “Disruptor 50” five times in ten years, and has been placed on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list multiple times, while Hyman herself has been named to the “TIME 100” most influential people in the world and as one of People magazine’s “Women Changing the World.”

Galway Office 

Rent The Runway established its European Technology Hub in Galway in April 2019.  Based in the historic Claddagh area of the city, the growing team in Galway tackles core technology challenges and influences the next generation of services critical to Rent The Runway’s success and continued growth. 

The Galway office is Rent the Runway's first international office outside the US and enables the company to significantly expand its Software Engineering, Product Development, Machine Learning Engineering and Data Science footprint. Rent The Runway’s Galway-based employees have the opportunity to grow their careers across several roles and career paths in Technology.

Our engineering team is smart, pragmatic, and entrepreneurial. We practice continuous integration & test-driven development, engage in constant peer code reviews & pair programming, and work hard to give back to the software community through open-source contributions.

About the Job:

As a Database Administrator/Reliability Engineer, you’ll take ownership of the performance, reliability, and data governance of our cloud-managed database platforms, primarily CloudSQL(MySQL) and MongoDB. A key part of the role is driving data lifecycle management — including pruning, archiving, and retention policies — to ensure our platform remains clean, compliant, and cost-efficient. You'll collaborate with engineering teams to optimize query performance, advance automation efforts, and evolve our database operations toward a modern, cloud-native, infrastructure-as-code model. As part of our broader data platform transformation, you’ll have the opportunity to take on scoped work in support of the Data Engineering team — contributing to the data platform rebuild through your expertise in database performance, structure, and governance. This is a hands-on, cross-functional role that plays a critical part in maintaining a scalable, governed, and low-maintenance data foundation as the business grows.

Key Responsibilities

• Availability & Reliability: Manage and optimise CloudSQL and MongoDB environments for performance, reliability, recovery, and cost.
• Data Administration: Improve platform efficiency through query tuning, schema design, and automation.
• Data Governance: Implement data lifecycle and governance practices (e.g. pruning, retention, access control).
• Change Management: Develop maintenance and operations automation through CI/CD pipelines, ensuring that database data and schema changes along with infrastructure updates are seamless and audited.
• Observability: Implement practices to build database-specific alerting, tracing, and automation that maintain the highest levels of data availability.
• Compliance: SOX-compliant access controls, ensuring data integrity and auditability are baked into the code.
• Operations: Support incident response, root cause analysis, and cross-functional platform initiatives.
• Take on scoped technical delivery work as part of broader platform initiatives.

Required Qualifications

• You have 6+ years of experience working with relational databases (e.g., MySQL, Postgres) in production, including cloud-managed services like CloudSQL or RDS
• You have 2+ years of hands-on experience with MongoDB, including performance tuning and applying governance or lifecycle practices
• You’ve worked in cloud-native environments (preferably GCP) and are comfortable using Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code tools
• You are proficient in Python (or another general-purpose language) for scripting, automation, or infrastructure workflows
• You have experience implementing CI/CD workflows for database changes and are familiar with Git-based deployment
• You’ve contributed to or enforced data governance policies such as retention, pruning, and access controls
• You’ve made measurable improvements to platform performance, cost, or reliability — including optimizing indexing strategies, query patterns, and database schema design
• You take ownership, communicate clearly, and enjoy collaborating with engineers and data teams
• You’re pragmatic, improvement-driven, and excited to shape the future of database engineering in a cloud-first world

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with Snowflake or BigQuery, including query performance and cost optimization
• Experience working with workflow orchestration tools such as Prefect, Airflow, or similar
• Experience integrating SQL or dbt linters into CI/CD workflows to enforce code quality and platform standards
• Experience designing or maintaining data quality checks, test automation, or schema validation workflows
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Helm to manage database operators and sidecar utilities.
• Background in tooling like Python, Go, or Java to automate away \"toil.\"

Benefits

At Rent the Runway, we’re committed to the happiness and well-being of our employees, and aim to create a workplace that fosters both personal and professional growth. Our inclusive benefits include, but are not limited to:

• Generous Paid Time Off, including annual leave, paid bereavement, and family sick leave - every employee needs time to take care of themselves and their family.
• Universal Paid Parental Leave for both parents + flexible return to work program  - because we know your newest family member(s) deserve your undivided attention.
• Paid Sabbatical after 5 years of continuous service - unplug, recharge, and have some fun.
• Competitive Stakeholder Pension - taking care of your future. 
• Comprehensive health, dental care and dependents care from day 1 of employment - Your health comes first, and we’ve got you covered. 
• Company-wide events and outings - our team spirit is no joke - we know how to have fun!
• Hybrid Work -This hybrid role requires 2-3 days per week in our Galway, Ireland office, with the option to work 2 days remotely.