Staff Database Engineer

Solvd Inc. is a rapidly growing AI-native consulting and technology services firm delivering enterprise transformation across cloud, data, software engineering, and artificial intelligence. We work with industry-leading organizations to design, build, and operationalize technology solutions that drive measurable business outcomes. Following the acquisition of Tooploox, a premier AI and product development company, Solvd now offers true end-to-end delivery—from strategic advisory and solution design to custom AI development and enterprise-scale implementation. Our capability centers combine deep technical expertise, proven delivery methodologies, and sector-specific knowledge to address complex business challenges quickly and effectively. Solvd is migrating a Tier-1 US payments platform from a single AWS region to a multi-region architecture in three phases (pilot light by EOY 2026, warm standby by EOY 2027, full active-active by EOY 2028). The data layer spans Aurora MySQL, Cassandra, ElastiCache (Redis / Valkey), DynamoDB, DocumentDB, OpenSearch, and Neptune. We're hiring multiple Database Engineers to implement the per-engine 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'LL BRING (REQUIRED) - 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 A…