Database Engineer

About Springer Nature Group

Springer Nature opens the doors to discovery for researchers, educators, clinicians and other professionals. Every day, around the globe, our imprints, books, journals, platforms and technology solutions reach millions of people. For over 180 years our brands and imprints have been a trusted source of knowledge to these communities and today, more than ever, we see it as our responsibility to ensure that fundamental knowledge can be found, verified, understood and used by our communities – enabling them to improve outcomes, make progress, and benefit the generations that follow. Visit group.springernature.com and follow @SpringerNature / @SpringerNatureGroup

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 experienced Database Engineer who will help us fulfil our mission to enable product teams to focus on delivering value.

About us: Engineering Enablement

The Engineering Enablement (EE) department consists of around 60 people, spread over teams that closely collaborate to fulfil our mission. In Springer Nature Technology (SNT) we serve different core expertise: PaaS, Databases, Observability and 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, Lisbon and New York. 

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 1,500 database servers.

Your team

This role is within the Database Engineering team, who are responsible for providing a managed database platform in a rapidly evolving and dynamic environment.

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 also with all the product development teams within Springer Nature. 

Your responsibility

Together with the team, you will share the responsibility of provisioning, configuring and maintaining databases across multiple platforms. 

Along with your team members, you provide expert services and guidance to development and product teams across Springer Nature. Developers will turn to you for support, guidance and assistance from initial provisioning to performance optimization.

You will use existing automation tools (based on Ansible) and improve them to manage our large number of servers and database instances.

Key Tasks:

• Maintaining and improving the database systems in production and development environments.
• Provisioning, configuring, patching, upgrading, and maintaining databases in multiple platforms. 
• Automating the management of new and existing databases to ensure that processes are repeatable and scalable.
• Monitoring and optimising database performance, including configuration, resource usage and query tuning. 
• Ensuring high availability of databases through clustering, replication, and other techniques.
• Taking an active role in supporting and in finding the root cause of operational issues and preventing recurrences.
• Working with the team to document processes, procedures, and technical designs related to database management.

In addition to database tasks, the team works together on the automation and infrastructure platform tooling. Upcoming planned work in the team includes adding serverless (CloudSQL, Memorystore, etc) and vector databases (Pinecone) to our core tooling, improving security patching automation and introducing continuous deployment for Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

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 and humble, open to learning from anyone regardless of age, gender, race, role or experience. You value social interactions and can self-reflect by asking questions. You are self-confident and smart, but never a smart-ass. You have a strong preference for working together, sharing knowledge and training others as opposed to quickly getting things done alone.

Desired Skills and Experience:

• Knowledge and experience administrating with MongoDB.
• Familiarity with one or more of the following technologies with a desire to expand on this knowledge: MySQL, ElasticSearch, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Marklogic, or Pinecone
• Strong understanding of database architecture, backup and recovery, and performance tuning. 
• Experience with database clustering and replication mechanisms.
• Familiarity with cloud-based database platforms, ideally GCP.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience in automation and configuration management.

Preferred Skills and Experience: 

• Experience of working with Cloud SQL
• Experience working with Google BigQuery
• Experience using Google Cloud Platform
• Unix shell scripting or programming experience.
• Experience with vector databases
• High user and customer orientation
• High sensitivity for security-relevant issues

Please note for internal candidates in Germany that this position is AT, therefore it will be paid outside the regular pay scale.

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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Internal applicants: We encourage you to speak to your manager once the interview process has started. At the point of offer acceptance, it is required that you inform your manager. If for any reason you’re unable to do so, please contact HR who can provide guidance as required.

 

For more information about career opportunities in Springer Nature please visit https://careers.springernature.com/