Senior Application DBA – Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE) (all humans)

Make a difference in the financial life of millions of people: At Erste Digital you are co-creating the digital future, in which better financial health is possible. #believeinyourself

We are part of Erste Group – the largest banking group in Central and Eastern Europe with more than 2,500 branches and over 45,000 employees. Our more than 2,000 IT experts and enthusiasts are the bank's Digital Muscle.

Tribe SRE is looking for a Senior Application DBA (DBRE) to improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of database-backed applications.

This is not a traditional infrastructure-focused DBA role. As a Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE), you will work at the intersection of application engineering, DevOps, and database engineering, ensuring that critical services remain performant, reliable, and scalable.

You will take an application-centric approach to database reliability: understanding real workloads and critical user journeys, identifying database-related performance bottlenecks, and working with engineering teams to address issues at their source.

You will also help evolve database operations toward a workload-driven, SLO-oriented engineering model, enabling teams through automation, engineering standards, and database best practices.

What to do:

• Analyze and optimize real application workloads, connecting user-facing performance issues with database-level causes.

• Improve database performance for critical application flows.

• Identify and resolve issues including inefficient execution plans, locking and contention, excessive database roundtrips.

• Define and track application-specific service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) covering latency (p95/p99), error rates, throughput, and saturation.

• Design monitoring around user experience, critical application flows, and business transactions.

• Partner with engineering teams during design and delivery, introducing practices such as query and index reviews, migration checklists, and performance-testing gates.

• Enable developers through database best practices, automation, self-service capabilities, and guidance on performance and reliability.

You check these boxes:

• Strong recent active experience as an Oracle DBA or Database Engineer in enterprise environments, with experience or exposure to PostgreSQL.

• Strong knowledge of SQL performance tuning, execution plans, AWR, ASH, explain plans, indexing strategies, and transaction behavior.

• Active experience optimizing application workloads rather than focusing solely on database infrastructure.

• Recent active experience improving latency, throughput, stability, and reliability of database-backed applications.

• Strong troubleshooting and root-cause analysis capabilities across application and database layers.

• Experience working in DevOps or platform engineering environments, including CI/CD pipelines, automation tools, and automated deployment approaches.

• Ability to automate operational tasks and build self-service capabilities for engineering teams.

• Experience with microservices or distributed architectures, cloud or hybrid environments, high-scale transactional systems, and load/performance testing tools is beneficial.

• Fluent English is required; German is considered an advantage.

Professional Skills:

• Builds reliable systems and thinks ahead about what can go wrong, making sure things keep working and improve over time.

• Takes ownership of work from start to finish and works closely with others to get the right outcome for the user.

• Keeps things simple, focuses on what matters, and removes unnecessary steps or complexity.

• Acts quickly on the most important work, adapts when needed, and learns from feedback.

• Supports others, leads by example, and helps create an environment where people can do their best work.

• Learns fast, adjusts easily to change, and keeps improving in a fast-moving environment.

• Delivers strong results and helps raise the level of the whole team.

• Contributes to a positive team culture by being open, respectful, and constructive, and by not tolerating toxic behavior.

Why you will like us:

• Possibility to benefit and learn from our international, talented and passionate community at Erste

• Interest groups and clubs: Take part in discussions and get involved in projects. Numerous interest groups invite you to engage with a topic

• Health Care – Taking care of your health is important. That’s why we contribute to your above standard medical examination and provide a helpline in case of hard lifetime situations. You also receive a salary compensation during sick leave

• Work-Life-Balance – Sabbatical, paternity leave, contribution to marriage & childbirth, 4 days of extra holiday per year, contribution to the 3rd pillar and MultiSport card. This is how we promote a balance between work, leisure, and family

• Employee Referral Program – Become a talent scout for career opportunities in IT. We are rewarding every successful referral for Erste Digital

• A competitive and performance-related salary dependent on your professional and personal qualifications is granted - we are obliged by law to quote the minimum wage of EUR 2.900,- gross per month for this full time position. But this is just a formality, we are more than happy to discuss your actual expectations.

The way we are:

Erste Group considers the diversity of its employees as key to innovation and success. As employer we are proud to offer everyone equal chances, irrespective of age, skin colour, religious belief, gender, sexual orientation or origin.