Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE)

About

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company is a world‑class entertainment and technology leader, delivering unforgettable experiences across theme parks, resorts, cruise lines, sports, news, movies, and more.

The Enterprise Technology mission is to deliver technology solutions that align with business strategies while enabling enterprise efficiency and promoting cross‑company collaborative innovation. Our group drives competitive advantage by enhancing consumer experiences, enabling business growth, and advancing operational excellence.

The Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE) team elevates SRE practices for database management technology and services at TWDC, promoting and onboarding new technologies, solving complex problems, and integrating with next‑generation digital platforms. DBREs use a software‑engineering approach to architect, design, automate, monitor, and build applications at scale, operating and engineering software with close business‑segment alignment to deliver platforms through efficient, effective, and resilient architectures.

The DBRE team builds, deploys, and operates database platforms (SQL Server and DB2) in an SRE/DevOps manner, managing on‑premises and cloud environments for critical Disney applications and services.

Responsibilities

• Lead, build, and mentor a high‑performing DBRE team supporting mission‑critical workloads
• Define and drive the DBRE operating model, promoting reliability, automation, and a product mindset
• Own database platform strategy across on‑prem, cloud, and hybrid environments
• Establish and monitor SLOs, SLAs, observability standards, and incident‑response processes
• Architect and oversee solutions for HA, DR, backup/recovery, capacity planning, and performance optimization
• Drive automation‑first practices for database provisioning, patching, deployments, and compliance
• Ensure compliance with operational standards, security policies, and best practices
• Partner with Application Engineering, Cloud DevOps, Security, and Infrastructure teams
• Evaluate and adopt emerging database technologies and tooling aligned to business needs
• Lead cost‑optimization efforts across database platforms and cloud consumption
• Provide architectural guidance, technical reviews, and executive‑level reporting
• Coordinate complex upgrades, migrations, and modernization initiatives
• Represent DBRE in cross‑functional leadership forums and stakeholder communications
• Manage budgets, vendor relationships, and continuous‑improvement initiatives

Required Qualifications & Skills

• 8+ years of hands‑on experience with major RDBMS platforms, including SQL Server and DB2
• Proven experience managing production databases across on‑premise and cloud platforms (AWS RDS, Azure Managed Databases)
• Experience leading/developing technical teams in fast‑paced, matrixed environments
• Strong verbal and written communication; executive‑level presentation skills
• Familiarity with programming/scripting languages (Shell, Python, Go, Java, C++, Ruby)
• Experience with configuration‑management/automation tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack)
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipeline integration and database deployment automation to support reliable, scalable operations
• Familiarity with infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, AWS CloudFormation)
• Multi‑cloud/hybrid environment experience; understanding of web‑app infrastructure
• Proven ability to manage and optimize budgets

Nice to Have

• Experience with additional DBMS: Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL
• Knowledge of Linux and Windows server environments
• Familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Familiarity with ServiceNow

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent