Manager Datastore Reliability Engineering

About Udemy

Udemy is an AI-powered skills acceleration platform built to help people and teams grow. It’s personalized, practical, and focused on real-world impact. Our mission is simple: to transform lives through learning. Your work helps people around the world build skills they can use, whether they’re picking up something new or leveling up to stay ahead. Over 80 million learners and 17,000 businesses already learn with Udemy. If you’re excited by change, energized by learning, and ready to have a real impact, you’ll feel right at home. Learn More About Us On Our Company Page.

Where we Work

Udemy is a global company headquartered in San Francisco, with additional U.S. offices in Denver and Austin, and international hubs in Australia, India, Ireland, Mexico, and Türkiye. This is an in-office position, requiring three days a week in the office (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) and flexibility on Mondays and Fridays.

About Your Skills

• Coaching & Team Development: You exhibit strong leadership and coaching skills, actively listening and asking diagnostic questions to effectively address team challenges and technical roadblocks. You are responsible for the technical development and career growth of the team, providing continuous coaching, mentorship, and fostering a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and psychological safety.
• Technical Architecture & System Thinking: You see beyond the present problem to identify the fundamental ‘why’, demonstrating strong systems thinking. You are capable of co-designing potential solutions, leading improvement projects for datastores and platform teams, and developing immutable infrastructure patterns and automation. This includes proficiency with managing Relational Databases (MySQL /PGSQL ) at scale, understanding production workloads in Kubernetes and AWS Managed Services, as well as expertise with tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Git.
• Cross-Team Collaboration & Influencing: You develop relationships effectively across the organization, strategically using these relationships to move work forward. You can scope solutions to gain agreement and push back when necessary for the team's or business's benefit. This includes advocating for and implementing positive changes through healthy discussions and maintaining close communication with team members.
• Decision Making & Problem Solving: You use critical thinking to follow defined decision-making processes, considering multiple perspectives. Upon making a decision, you communicate clearly to ensure alignment in execution. You also demonstrate strong troubleshooting skills to diagnose complex database issues and participate in on-call rotations with a systematic approach to incident management.

About This Role

As part of Udemy's Platform Portfolio, the Datastore Infrastructure (DSI) team is responsible for overseeing all aspects of MySQL, Redis, and Kafka production infrastructure. This includes ensuring uptime, compliance, observability, performance, improving developers' productivity and developing future growth strategies . The team is split between EU and US regions. As the hands-on Manager for Datastore Infrastructure, you will play a vital role in overseeing day-to-day activities and engineering strategies of DSI, ensuring that millions of students worldwide achieve greater learning and career outcomes on Udemy. We value teamwork, a good sense of humour, strong ownership, technological curiosity, and a desire to learn. To be successful in this role, you will collaborate closely with engineering, product, and a diverse set of stakeholders around the world. You are not just interested in maintaining systems but also writing the software that maintains them. You strongly believe in a no-blame culture and advocate for humane on-call practices. You constantly seek opportunities for improvement and thrive in an environment where you can drive positive change.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Build a team culture that values quality, robustness, and scalability of our systems while fostering initiatives and innovation.
• Lead improvement projects for our datastores and platform teams to align with the company’s long term objectives.
• Advocate for and implement positive changes in tools and processes through healthy discussions.
• Adapt and enforce PCI compliance and SOC 2 security requirements, adhering to policies and standards, and adapting processes as needed
• Mentor and develop engineers within the organisation.
• Participate in the on-call rotation while demonstrating a methodical and systematic approach to incident management

What You’ll Have

• 3-5 years of professional experience leading a Cloud Engineering team (SRE/DBRE team or similar) with Infrastructure responsibilities in managing large production workloads.
• Experience leading database deployment automation initiatives.
• Knowledge of tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Git/GitLab, ArgoCD/Argo Workflows, or alternatives in any combination.
• Experience managing MySQL, Kafka, and/or Redis systems in AWS at scale both in-house and managed service equivalents (Aurora/MSK/Elasticache)
• Knowledge of configuration management tools and monitoring and alerting systems for database infrastructure.
• Familiarity with scaling strategies and techniques to handle increasing data volumes.
• Hands-on experience with AWS cloud infrastructure and security best practices.
• Proven track record of driving change and motivating engineers to embrace change.

Why work here?

• You’ll grow here. Learning is part of the job. You’ll get full access to Udemy courses, a monthly UDay to invest in yourself, and a budget to spend on whatever helps you improve. Many people are diving into AI lately, but what you focus on is up to you.
• AI is real here. We use it in the way we learn and the way we work. You’ll have the space and tools to experiment, apply, and get better at using AI in practical ways.
• You’ll own your work. We trust people to lead, make decisions, and follow through. You don’t need to wait for permission or layers of approval to have an impact.
• You’ll Build With Others. We collaborate openly and shape ideas together. Everyone has a voice, and good thinking is welcomed from any direction.
• You’ll see your impact. What you build helps people grow their skills, change their careers, or find a path forward. You’ve got the experience, why not use it to help others gain theirs?

Bring your curiosity. We’ll bring the platform and the support. Let’s LEARN together.

Our Benefits Start With U

Our benefits start with you and were built to provide you and your family with the protection and care you need, making it easy to access the right coverage when you need it most. Benefits vary by region, and we encourage applicants to review our Australia Benefits, India Benefits, Ireland Benefits, Mexico Benefits, Turkiye Benefits & US Benefits, pages to get an understanding of some of the benefits we offer. For details on region-specific benefits, please refer to the information provided during the hiring process. Benefits outlined are provided as a general overview and may vary depending on the location, role, and employment classification. All benefits are subject to change at the discretion of the organization and in accordance with applicable laws and policies. At Udemy, we value diversity and inclusion and consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, medical condition, or disability. We understand that not everyone will match each of the qualifications. However, we also realize that everyone has unique experiences that can add value to our company. Even if you think your background might not perfectly align, we'd love to hear from you! Information regarding data privacy is available within the Udemy Careers Privacy Notice.

Key skills/competency

• Datastore Reliability Engineering
• Cloud Engineering
• SRE
• DBRE
• Infrastructure Management
• Database Automation
• MySQL
• AWS
• Kubernetes
• Incident Management