Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Database Focus)

📋 Job Overview

GoCardless, a Mollie company, is a global leader in bank payments. Over 100,000 businesses, from start-ups to household names, use GoCardless to collect, manage and send bank payments through Direct Debit, real-time payments and open banking. With US$130bn+ processed annually across 30+ countries, we handle recurring and one-off payments without the chasing, stress, or expensive fees. Our end-to-end payment platform also features AI-powered solutions to improve payment success and reduce fraud, alongside connections to over 350 platforms businesses use everyday.

We are headquartered in the UK, with teams and operations spanning North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information, please visit www.gocardless.com and follow us on LinkedIn @GoCardless.

Mollie is the leading payments and financial services partner for business, rooted in Europe, with global reach.

🏢 About GoCardless

Platform Engineering at GoCardless is a unified, globally distributed team, currently located in London, Riga and Lisbon. We work with all other engineering teams to empower them to build, release, run and scale their products, with a strong focus on both strategic project delivery and operational excellence.

🎯 The Role

We’re looking for a Senior SRE with deep PostgreSQL expertise to own the reliability, performance and scalability of our database estate. Our databases sit at the heart of a payments platform, so slowdowns and outages directly affect our customers.

You’ll work across our self-managed Stolon clusters and our GCP Cloud SQL fleet. Joining Mollie gives us the opportunity to consolidate, modularise and rethink how we run production databases, and you’ll help us do that while keeping everything reliable.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Run our database fleet reliably. Keep our production databases healthy and stable through significant change, including moves between platforms.
• Own performance and capacity. Right-size instances, tune connection limits and pooling (PgBouncer), memory and autovacuum settings, and fix slow queries, N+1s and unused indexes before customers feel them.
• Own upgrades and change. Lead major-version database upgrades end to end with minimal downtime, and own safe schema migrations, data migrations and backfills.
• Build in resilience. Reduce idle-in-transaction sessions, tighten statement timeouts, and design and test failover, replication and backup and recovery.
• Make it observable. Build dashboards and alerts in Grafana, Prometheus and Datadog to track saturation, latency and connection health.
• Partner with application teams. Help them use their databases well and improve their query patterns.
• Respond and learn. Take part in on-call, mitigate live database incidents, and run root cause analyses to prevent repeats.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Typically 5+ years of production experience running PostgreSQL, including high availability, replication, and backup and recovery
• Deep knowledge of Postgres performance and tuning: internals (memory settings, autovacuum, locking) and connection pooling, including managing it in production and supporting it on call
• Experience running production databases in the cloud, whether on managed services or self-managed on cloud infrastructure
• Strong query analysis skills (EXPLAIN plans, indexing strategy)
• Experience running major-version upgrades safely with minimal downtime
• Experience managing infrastructure as code with Terraform or similar IaC tooling
• Experience with monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog or similar)
• Experience writing code/working in software engineering teams
• Experience with on-call and incident response
• Ability to influence application teams

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience with Stolon, or similar Postgres HA tooling
• Experience with managed cloud Postgres (GCP CloudSQL, AWS RDS etc.)
• Experience with Kubernetes, GKE and ArgoCD
• Experience migrating databases between platforms
• Experience with SLOs and error budgets
• Experience in payments or financial services

🎁 Benefits

Base salary range: €70,560 - €105,840

Wellbeing - stay healthy with dedicated support and medical cover
Lunch - based on the location, you either get a meal voucher or a paid lunch when working from the office
Work away scheme - gives you the option to work away from your country of residence for up to 20 working days in any 12-month period
Adaptive Working - allows you to work flexibly, around your lifestyle
Parental leave - to suit everyone embarking on life's great adventure
Learning Budget - lead your own development with an annual learning budget
Time off - generous holiday allowance + volunteer days for ERG events + one day off if you need to move house

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

We’re rooting for you during your application and GoCardless aims to provide reasonable adjustments to make our recruitment process as remarkable and accessible as we can. Please speak to your Talent Partner if you need extra support.