Staff Database Engineer

Solvd is migrating a Tier-1 US payments platform from a single AWS region to a multi-region architecture.
We're hiring a Staff Database Engineer to implement the DynamoDB replication, failover, and operational tooling for this program. You'll work under the Principal Database Architect and partner with the client's data and SRE teams.
What you'll do
Implement and operate cross-region replication using Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables, ensuring reliable multi-region data replication, high availability, consistency, and disaster recovery.
Codify everything in Terraform (or CDK).
Build the observability layer for replication health: lag metrics, consistency checks, alarm thresholds, and runbook automation. Datadog is the primary observability stack; CloudWatch is the baseline.
Author and execute failover and failback runbooks. Run game-days using AWS Fault Injection Service. Measure and report against RTO and RPO targets.
Implement KMS cross-account replication, IAM service principals for replication roles, and the secrets and parameter strategy for region-local dependencies.
Support data extraction from the monolith into microservices: build CDC pipelines (DMS, DynamoDB Streams, Kafka Connect, Debezium), validate data integrity, and own the cutover sequence for individual extractions.
Pair with application engineers on connection-string abstraction, retry and idempotency patterns, and graceful degradation during region failover.
Write design docs and runbooks the client team can take over after the engagement.
What you bring
8+ years in production database engineering on AWS, with hands-on responsibility for at least one of: payments, banking, brokerage, or comparable financial-services workloads.
Deep production experience with DynamoDB and at least two of: Aurora MySQL, Cassandra, ElastiCache (Redis or Valkey), DocumentDB, Neptune. Working knowledge of at least two more.
Practical experience with cross-region replication in production using DynamoDB Global Tables: you've configured and operated multi-region DynamoDB deployments and handled failure scenarios such as replication conflicts, regional outages, replication delays, and consistency or version-skew issues.
Strong Terraform (or CDK). You can build a multi-region module from scratch and explain the trade-offs.
Comfort with CDC tooling (DMS, DDB Streams, Kafka Connect, or Debezium) and the operational gotchas (schema drift, ordering guarantees, replay).
Linux, networking fundamentals (VPC, Transit Gateway, peering, DNS), and IAM / KMS proficiency.
Solid written communication and ability to operate in a regulated client environment.
Nice to have
Cassandra multi-DC operations experience at scale (nodetool workflows, repair strategy, tombstone management, cross-region anti-entropy).
AWS MSK or Kafka MirrorMaker 2 experience for cross-region event replication.
Experience with Datadog Database Monitoring and custom CloudWatch metrics.
AWS Database Specialty or Solutions Architect Associate / Professional certifications.

Work arrangement
Yes