Cloud Database Engineer

Ellucian powers innovation for higher education, partnering with approximately 3,000 customers across 50 countries, serving more than 21 million students. Ellucian's AI-powered platform, trained on the richest dataset available in higher education, drives efficiency, personalized experiences, and strengthened engagement for all students, faculty and staff. Fueled by decades of experience with a singular focus on the unique needs of learning institutions, the Ellucian platform features best-in-class SaaS capabilities and delivers insights needed now and into the future. These solutions and services span the entire student lifecycle, including data-rich tools for student recruitment, enrollment, and retention to workforce analytics, fundraising, and alumni engagement. Ellucian's innovative solutions, vast ecosystem of partners and user community of more than 45,000 provides best practices leading to greater institutional success and achieving better student outcomes.

Ellucian is seeking a highly skilled Cloud Database Engineer to join our innovative and collaborative Cloud Operations team. We are dedicated to delivering world-class, customer-focused SaaS solutions for higher education. This is a hands-on technical role focused on operating, optimizing, and automating the data platforms behind Ellucian’s SaaS and Managed Cloud offerings. The role sits at the intersection of cloud operations, reliability engineering, and emerging AI‑assisted tooling.

Where You Will Make an Impact

Operate:

• Operate production and non-production databases across AWS. Primarily PostgreSQL, Aurora PostgreSQL, Oracle and NoSQL databases.
• Own capacity planning, patching, upgrades, and configuration.
• Design and validate high-availability architectures, replication topologies, and disaster recovery plans through regular recovery exercises.

Automate:

• Design and maintain automation for provisioning, patching, backups, failover, and schema migrations. We are heavily committed to infrastructure-as-code patterns.
• Implement GitOps-based CI/CD pipelines for database changes using Liquibase, with a focus on moving towards zero-downtime migrations.

Adopt AI:

• Define and govern the use of AI and agentic tooling for database operations, including evaluation, piloting, and adoption.
• Supervise AI-generated outputs and establish guardrails, approval workflows, and auditability.

Monitor:

• Define SLIs and SLOs for database services and hold the team accountable to them. Build dashboards and alerts that drive proactive action, not noise.
• Own database incident response, including RCA and post-incident reviews.
• Instrument metrics, logs and traces to ensure visibility into database health.

Optimize:

• Diagnose and tune queries, schemas, indexes, and resource configurations. Comfortable analyzing execution plans and making informed indexing decisions.
• Contribute to load testing and capacity planning as our SaaS footprint grows.
• Manage cloud database costs through thoughtful capacity planning, sizing, and tiering.

Secure:

• Enforce encryption at rest and in transit, least-privilege IAM, and proper audit logging.
• Support compliance attestations for FERPA, SOC 2, and other applicable frameworks.
• Implement data masking and synthetic data strategies for non-production environments.

Collaborate:

• Partner with Product Engineering, Platform, Security, and Data teams. Translate database constraints into actionable guidance for engineers and product managers.
• Mentor DBAs and engineers to raise overall team capability and upskill.

What You Will Bring

• 4+ years operating production databases at scale. SaaS experience strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated automation experience: Terraform or CloudFormation, CI/CD pipelines, GitOps patterns.
• Deep experience with PostgreSQL and/or Aurora PostgreSQL. You understand vacuuming, connection pooling, replication lag, and why "just add an index" isn't always the answer.
• Working knowledge of Oracle Database Administration.
• Solid scripting skills: Python, Bash, or similar.
• Experience with schema migration tooling: Liquibase preferred, but Flyway or similar counts. You understand why "just run this SQL script" doesn't scale.
• Hands-on experience designing and testing HA/DR architectures, balancing RTO, RPO, and cost.
• Familiarity with observability tools: Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, CloudWatch. You've defined SLIs and SLOs and used them to drive operational improvements.
• Security-conscious by default: encryption, IAM best practices, audit logging. Bonus if you've supported SOC 2 or similar compliance programs.
• Clear written and verbal communication. You'll write runbooks, post-incident reports, and technical proposals that people outside the DBA team need to understand.

• Comprehensive health coverage: family major medical expenses, dental and life insurance.
• Christmas bonus 30 days
• Saving fund
• Monthly food coupon
• 15 workdays vacation
• Thrive Flex Program that allows you to contribute towards your health, financial or learning interests
• 5 charitable days to support the community that supports us
• Diversity and inclusion programs that promote employee resource groups such as: Women in Technology, Pride and Go Green to name a few.
• Parental leave
• Employee referral bonuses to encourage the addition of great new people to the team
• We Foster a learning culture with:
  • Tuition Reimbursement Assistance 
  • Professional development opportunities
  • LinkedIn Learning

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