Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Database Platform

At Shopify, Infrastructure Engineers build and operate the systems that make global commerce available, scalable, performant, secure, simple, and cost-effective.
We’re hiring a Senior or Staff Infrastructure Engineer to join the Database Platform group within Shopify’s Infrastructure organization. This team owns the production infrastructure behind Shopify’s global database: a YugabyteDB-based, PostgreSQL-compatible, horizontally scalable data platform that is becoming a core system of truth for Shopify.
This role is hands-on. You’ll write code, operate production systems, debug hard distributed-systems failures, improve reliability, and build the tooling that lets Shopify run Yugabyte safely at scale. At the Staff level, we’ll expect you to lead through ambiguity, own the hardest technical problems, influence across teams, and model accountability for systems where the pager escalates to you.
Here is a sampling of some of the types of systems we are improving and automating:
- Our backup systems (e.g. snapshots, backup verifications)
- Configuration management tools (we use Ansible today)
- Third-party tools such as PgBouncer
- Internal control plane for managing our fleet
- Data and schema migration tooling
- Building database safety and performance guardrails that help application teams ship safely
- Managing and operating our global database built on top of YugabyteDB
QUALIFICATIONS
Experience and skills that are important for success in this role (we don’t expect you to have done all of this):
- The ability to write high quality code in a high level programming language (e.g. Go, Ruby)
- Experience or interest in configuration management, ease working in a Linux shell
- Experience with relational databases, PostgreSQL internals, distributed databases, or database reliability engineering
- Experience with a cloud platform (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Experience with Site Reliability engineering/ DevOps practices or a software engineer, interested in infrastructure work
- Strong technical mentorship, dedication to psychological safety at the workplace
- Self-starter and a team player keen on mentoring others and growing your own skill set within a fast paced environment.
- Experience working on a remote or distributed engineering team.
- A commitment and drive for quality, technical excellence and results
- Participating in an on call rotation and/or site/database reliability engineering (SRE/DRE) experience
While our stack currently comprises YugabyteDB, Ansible, Ubuntu, Ruby, Golang, Kubernetes, PgBouncer, Google Cloud Platform, experience with the exact components of the current stack is not always necessary. Your willingness and enthusiasm to learn is the top requirement.
At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly—not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you're ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a live pair programming session, come prepared with your own IDE.
This role requires on-call work.
Ready to build the backbone of Shopify? Join the team that's making commerce better for everyone.