Senior Database Reliability Engineer

📋 Job Overview

Are you curious, excited by experimentation and always looking to innovate? Do you want to work in embedded payments where you can keep learning and developing whilst getting hands-on experience? Do you want to have the opportunity to play an important role in a rapidly growing and exciting Fintech business? If so, we would love to connect and collaborate!

🏢 About Modulr

Modulr is the payments automation platform that streamlines money movement with accuracy, control and reliability — built to scale. We process more than 200m transactions and over £180bn in payment value on an annualised basis, and we’re trusted by over 6,000 businesses from fast-growing SMEs to global enterprises. We automate how money moves into and out of a business — payroll, supplier payments, spend management and payment collection — through a single platform, connected to the accounting and payroll systems finance teams already use and underpinned by principal memberships of Visa and Mastercard and direct access to central bank infrastructure. As a regulated payments provider with over a decade of experience, we’re the platform finance teams trust to run mission-critical operations. Modulr is backed by PayPal, FIS, General Atlantic, Blenheim Chalcot, Frog Capital and Highland Europe, with over 400 employees across London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Mumbai and Pune.

🎯 The Role

Modulr is a B2B embedded-payments platform operating at scale in a regulated environment. As we evolve our core data architecture, we’re hiring our first dedicated Database Reliability Engineer to raise the operational resilience of our payments platform. This is a hands-on role for someone who thinks like a Site Reliability Engineer but has deep database expertise — someone who wants to make a large, busy production estate observable, diagnosable, and safe to operate, and to be the database voice that shapes how we scale. It carries a clear path toward a data-architecture mandate as the platform matures.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own the reliability, performance, and observability of our production databases (primarily PostgreSQL / Amazon Aurora), so that issues are seen and understood in minutes, not hours.
• Lead deep-dive diagnosis of production incidents — query performance, lock and wait-event analysis, connection-pool behaviour, blocking sessions — and turn findings into lasting fixes and runbooks.
• Build proactive guardrails: query and statement timeouts, connection-pool standards, slow-query and contention alerting, capacity and saturation monitoring.
• Partner with engineering squads to design schemas, indexes, and access patterns that scale, and to enforce safe database practices in their services.
• Contribute the database-reliability perspective to significant platform-evolution work, including separation of read and write paths and the decomposition of shared database components.
• Improve our database observability tooling and dashboards so reliability is measurable and trends are visible before they become incidents.
• Help embed a culture of operational excellence, blameless post-incident review, and continuous improvement.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Substantial hands-on experience operating production PostgreSQL (Aurora / RDS a strong plus) at meaningful scale.
• Genuine SRE mindset: comfortable with observability tooling, metrics and tracing, alerting, automation, and infrastructure-as-code — not just database administration.
• Demonstrable strength in performance diagnosis: reading query plans, identifying lock contention and blocking, resolving connection-pool exhaustion, and tuning for throughput and latency.
• Experience supporting high-availability, low-tolerance systems where correctness and uptime both matter.
• Clear, calm communicator who can lead a live incident and explain root cause to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Scripting/automation ability (e.g. Python, Bash) and working familiarity with AWS and Kubernetes-based environments.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Exposure to payments, fintech, or other regulated, high-availability domains.
• Experience with data-observability or lineage tooling and with connection-management layers such as PgBouncer / RDS Proxy.
• Familiarity with decomposing monolithic databases and introducing read/write separation.

🎁 Benefits

Modulr is a leading fintech platform providing Payments Automation and enterprise payment solutions. We serve high-growth businesses across multiple verticals including Lending, Travel, Banking, and Core Business Payments, operating across India, the UK, Europe, and beyond. Our mission is to simplify and automate payments for our customers, and we're building a diverse, talented team to support that mission. Our people are central to our success, and we're committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility