About this role
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.