Sr Staff Operations Engineer

Job Overview

Intuit Mailchimp is a leading marketing platform for small businesses. We empower millions of customers worldwide to build their brands and grow their companies through a powerful suite of marketing automation, multichannel campaigns, CRM, and analytics tools.

Mailchimp’s Engineering organization builds and operates the code and infrastructure that makes this possible. The Database Engineering team partners closely with Product, SRE, Data Services, Application Performance, Networking, and Infrastructure Operations to deliver resilient, scalable, and secure data platforms at massive scale.

We take a pragmatic, outcome-driven approach to engineering—leveraging proven technologies while building robust tooling and processes on top of well-understood foundations. As we continue to scale rapidly across cloud and hybrid environments, we are seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership for our database infrastructure and instrumentation strategy.

Role Overview

As a Senior Staff Engineer on the Database Engineering team, you will serve as a technical authority and organizational multiplier, responsible for shaping the long-term vision, architecture, and operational excellence of Mailchimp’s database platforms. You will lead complex initiatives across thousands of database instances spanning colocation and multi-cloud environments (AWS and GCP), while mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction across Intuit.

This role requires deep hands-on expertise, strong systems thinking, and the ability to drive alignment across teams with competing priorities. You will be accountable not only for today’s reliability and performance, but also for evolving the platform to meet the needs of the next generation of Mailchimp products.

This position includes participation in an overnight on-call rotation.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Own and evolve the technical vision and roadmap for Mailchimp’s database infrastructure, ensuring scalability, resiliency, security, and cost efficiency.

• Lead architecture decisions across multiple database technologies, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Spanner, CloudSQL, RDS, and emerging data stores.

• Drive platform-level standards and best practices for database design, availability, disaster recovery, performance, and observability.

• Evaluate, prototype, and recommend new and emerging technologies, balancing innovation with operational pragmatism.

Cross-Functional Influence

• Partner deeply with product engineering teams to improve database performance, reliability, and developer experience.

• Act as a trusted advisor to Intuit and Mailchimp engineering leaders on data storage strategy and trade-offs.

• Collaborate across SRE, Infrastructure, Networking, Security, and Data teams to solve complex, cross-org technical challenges.

Operational Excellence

• Provide technical leadership for large-scale production databases across production, non-production, and development environments.

• Lead and improve incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident learning for database-related outages.

• Drive automation for provisioning, upgrades, patching, backups, and failover using Infrastructure as Code and orchestration tooling.

• Support and accelerate the migration from colocation facilities to cloud-native architectures.

Engineering Craft & Execution

• Design and build automation and tooling using languages such as Python, Go, Shell, or similar.

• Improve instrumentation, monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning for database systems at scale.

• Ensure regular upgrades and security patching to meet compliance and risk standards.

Talent & Knowledge Leadership

• Mentor and coach engineers across experience levels, raising the bar for technical excellence.

• Lead design reviews, architecture discussions, and technical deep dives.

• Produce high-quality technical documentation to communicate architectural decisions and educate engineering and leadership stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing, operating, and scaling large-scale database infrastructure in complex, distributed environments.

• Deep expertise with relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, and cloud-managed databases including Amazon RDS, CloudSQL, and Spanner.

• Strong experience with AWS and/or GCP in production environments.

• Proven experience with database architecture, including replication, clustering, HA/DR, and performance tuning.

• Strong programming and scripting skills (e.g., Python, Go, Shell, PHP).

• Hands-on experience with automation and infrastructure tooling such as Terraform, Puppet, GitHub, RunDeck, or similar.

• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), service deployment, monitoring, and scaling.

• Demonstrated ability to make pragmatic, high-impact technical decisions in ambiguous environments.

• Experience influencing and leading across large, globally distributed engineering organizations.

Preferred

• Experience leading or significantly contributing to cloud migration initiatives at scale.

• Strong background in operational excellence, including on-call ownership and incident management.

• Track record of shaping technical direction beyond a single team.

Intuit provides a competitive compensation package with a strong pay for performance rewards approach. This position may be eligible for a cash bonus, equity rewards and benefits, in accordance with our applicable plans and programs (see more about our compensation and benefits at Intuit®: Careers | Benefits). Pay offered is based on factors such as job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and work location. To drive ongoing fair pay for employees, Intuit conducts regular comparisons across categories of ethnicity and gender. The expected base pay range for this position is: 

New York $ 214,000- 289,500