Database Engineer

Database Engineer  

Building services that enable others 

Springer Nature is one of the world’s leading global research, educational and professional publishers. It is home to an array of respected and trusted brands and imprints, with more than 170 years of combined history behind them, providing quality content through a range of innovative products and services. Every day, around the globe, our imprints, books, journals and resources reach millions of people, helping researchers and scientists to discover, students to learn and professionals to achieve their goals and ambitions. The company has around 10,000 staff in over 50 countries. 

We’re looking for an aspiring Database Engineer, with an IaC mindset, to help us achieve our mission to enable product teams to focus on delivering value. 

About us: Engineering Enablement 

The Engineering Enablement department consists of around 60 people, spread over teams that closely collaborate to fulfil our mission. In Springer Nature Technology we serve different core expertise: PaaS, Databases, Observability, Cloud and Release Engineering. You will join a multidisciplinary team with different nationalities, backgrounds and experience levels. We are a very distributed department but sometimes we travel to work with each other in person. We are based around the globe with main locations in London, Dordrecht, Berlin, and Lisbon. 

Our Technology 

We have built platforms serving hundreds of developers at scale around the world. We are making more and more use of Kubernetes as a backend container platform and integrating this into our platform offering. We are leveraging the power of Kubernetes to build a new PaaS that will co-exist with the current Cloud Foundry Platform, as well as managing an internal database platform that runs over 1,200 database servers. 

Your responsibility 

Together with the team, you will share the responsibility of developing and improving our platforms along with maintenance tasks, documentation, running updates and keeping our systems secure. As a department, we focus and engage on providing a unified and standardised platform by using modern and open standards. Our unified platform approach is encompassed by core capabilities, like observability, continuous integration, security and storage. We therefore closely collaborate within our department so that the core capabilities get tightly integrated and the product teams within Springer Nature are provided with a unified experience. 

This role is within the Database Engineering team, who maintain, develop and scale our managed database capability. 

The team consists of Platform Engineers and Database Engineers who work together to provide managed database services - and the underlying cloud-based infrastructure - for internal customers across the organisation. 

As with all teams in EE, we closely collaborate with the departmental teams that provide the platform’s surrounding and centralised services (CI/CD system, observability tools and our internal runtime platforms) and so with all the product development teams within Springer Nature. 

You will contribute to the evolution of our database services through leveraging IaC, maximising customer self-service and living the continuous integration mindset. You help to improve and optimise the existing database platform to maximise capacity for consultation with internal customers. 

With support from teammates, you will grow in confidence and expertise to be able to provide guidance to development and product teams across Springer Nature. 

You are comfortable to advise internal customers on the best solution for their needs, providing advice and guidance on schema setup.

Core technologies in use: 

• Postgres, Mongo, MySQL 

• ElasticSearch 

• GCP, AWS 

• Terraform, Ansible 

• Docker 

• Concourse, GitHub Actions 

• Grafana LGTM stack, Sentry, Open Telemetry 

• Cloud Foundry 

• Kubernetes, Kubevela, GKE 

You will have the opportunity to work on new challenges and drive the evolution of our services in a collaborative and supportive environment. 

About you 

You are a friendly team member who is modest, humble and open to learning from anyone regardless of age, gender, race, role or experience. You value social interactions, are open to feedback and introspection and you can self-reflect by asking questions.  You are confident in your abilities but aware of your limitations. You have a strong preference for working together, collaborating across domains and practices, sharing knowledge and training others as opposed to quickly getting things done alone. You understand the value of doing meaningful and sustainable work rather than implementing temporary fixes to meet arbitrary deadlines. 

Desired Skills and Experience: 

• Knowledge and experience of managing one of the following: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL or ElasticSearch 

• Experience in operating and maintaining cloud infrastructure 

• Desire to broaden your knowledge and experience in this area 

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), for automation and configuration management 

• Programming experience with Golang, Ruby, Python or at least one modern language 

• Experience with automation frameworks (e.g. Terraform, Puppet or Ansible) 

• Knowledge of Observability practices 

• Familiarity with Docker and containerization 

• Ability to work in a team context with a focus on collaboration and shared ownership 

Preferred Skills and Experience:  

• Understanding of database architecture, backup and recovery, and performance tuning  

• Experience with database clustering and replication mechanisms. 

• Experience of working with Cloud SQL 

• Experience using GCP or AWS 

• Experience of using (and ideally developing) REST APIs 

• Experience of developing web applications 

• Experience with common CI/CD tools 

We are looking forward to your application. After reviewing your CV our Talent Acquisition team will contact you to schedule a short initial phone/video call. After getting this first step we will run 2-3 rounds (introductory, technical, cultural) with you - all of these with different members of the Engineering Enablement team. When appropriate these phases will be held via phone /video calls.   

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