Sr. Database Reliability Engineer II

As a Sr. Database Reliability Engineer II at NinjaTrader, you will architect, evolve, and optimize the data platform powering the company's core trading applications. This role blends deep MySQL and Postgres expertise with active software development. You'll partner with software engineers, architects, and platform teams to improve database performance, evolve data architecture, build developer tooling, and establish engineering best practices that enable the platform to scale.

What you'll do

• Design and evolve MySQL schemas supporting high-volume transactional workloads
• Define and drive improvements to NinjaTrader's data platform architecture, including online schema changes, zero/low-downtime database migrations, blue/green deployments, and scalability initiatives
• Analyze and optimize SQL queries, indexes, and execution plans to improve application performance
• Develop production-quality software that improves the persistence layer, developer tooling, and data platform capabilities
• Design scalable data models that balance performance, maintainability, and long-term growth
• Build reusable libraries, frameworks, and tooling that simplify data access and improve developer productivity across engineering teams
• Lead database performance tuning initiatives across applications and services
• Drive modernization initiatives for database architecture, deployment processes, and operational reliability
• Design and implement safe, repeatable database migration strategies supporting continuous delivery
• Investigate and resolve complex production issues involving application performance, database behavior, locking, concurrency, and data integrity
• Establish engineering standards and best practices for schema design, indexing, SQL development, database migrations, and data access patterns
• Partner with Platform Engineering to improve database monitoring, backup strategies, disaster recovery, and operational resilience
• Leverage Google Cloud Platform services, including Cloud SQL, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, and related tooling, to improve reliability, scalability, and observability
• Mentor engineers on data modeling, SQL optimization, MySQL best practices, and application performance optimization
• Lead technical design discussions and architecture reviews related to database-backed applications
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend solutions that improve platform scalability, maintainability, and engineering efficiency
• Serve as a technical leader and trusted advisor for database architecture, application performance, and data platform best practices

What you bring

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong experience building backend applications using Java, C#, Go, Python, Kotlin, Scala, or similar modern programming languages
• Expert-level experience with MySQL in large-scale production environments
• Deep understanding of SQL optimization, query execution plans, indexing strategies, transactions and isolation levels, locking and concurrency, schema design and normalization, and replication and high availability
• Experience designing scalable database schemas for high-volume transactional applications
• Experience troubleshooting complex application and database performance issues
• Experience implementing database migration strategies supporting continuous delivery
• Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, and engineering best practices
• Experience leading technical initiatives and influencing architectural decisions across engineering teams
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineers and cross-functional stakeholders
• Passion for improving developer productivity by building automation, developer tooling, database testing frameworks, performance benchmarking harnesses, and engineering best practices

Nice to have

• Experience building and operating applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Experience with Cloud SQL for MySQL
• Experience using Google Cloud services such as Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Secret Manager, Cloud Build, or Cloud Deploy
• Experience supporting financial services, trading platforms, or other high-throughput transactional systems
• Experience working in startup or high-growth engineering environments where engineers owned both application development and database performance
• Experience improving developer productivity through tooling and automation
• Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems
• Experience implementing observability solutions, performance monitoring, and database telemetry
• Experience leveraging AI/ML tools or technologies to improve software development, operational efficiency, or engineering productivity

What we offer

• Salary range of $130,000-$180,000 USD, plus an annual target bonus of 10% based on individual performance (50%) and company/team performance (50%)
• 401k plan with 3.5% company match
• 18 days annual paid time off plus 7 paid holidays, plus 1 service day annually
• Health, vision, and dental coverage
• Life and disability insurance covered 100% by NinjaTrader
• Paid parental bonding leave
• Hybrid work for Chicago-based employees: in-office Tuesday through Thursday, remote Monday and Friday, plus 20 additional flex remote days annually and 5 company-wide office-optional weeks tied to major holidays
• Remote flexibility for exceptional candidates in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, and Wisconsin

About NinjaTrader

NinjaTrader is an industry-leading trading platform and futures broker serving over 2 million users worldwide. Founded in 2003, the company is rated number one in futures brokerage globally and provides cutting-edge software and brokerage services for traders across financial markets. The role is based in Chicago, IL.