About the position

Q2 is a leading provider of digital banking and lending solutions to banks, credit unions, alternative finance companies, and fintechs in the U.S. and internationally. Our mission is simple: build strong and diverse communities through innovative financial technology—and we do that by empowering our people to help create success for our customers. We run a large SQL Server estate at serious scale, mostly on EC2, alongside a fast-growing set of PostgreSQL, Aurora, Snowflake, MongoDB, and Pinecone workloads supporting analytical and AI use cases. We are primarily an AWS shop with a small Azure footprint, and this team keeps that estate fast, available, recoverable, and cost-efficient for the financial institutions that depend on it. We are looking for a manager who owns production and drives our engineers to be the best versions of themselves. Not someone who reacts to what breaks, but someone who anticipates risk, guides a highly skilled team to the best solution, and drives programs end to end without being told to. Patching and maintenance are an afterthought for us; the successful candidate is already thinking about the problems the team hasn't realized it has yet. A defining trait of this team is that we build our own solutions rather than outsource: we build custom tooling so we can scale with technology instead of people, while knowing the line where a vendor solves it more economically. We serve two sets of customers who both matter deeply. Externally, a bad day for us can mean a bank that anchors a local community is unavailable to the people who depend on it. Internally, our stakeholders are other Q2'ers, and the goal is to multiply their impact through self-service tooling to the point where they don't need a DBA at all.

Responsibilities

• Own production: accountable for availability, performance, and recoverability across the multi-engine estate.
• Own the coverage model and act as the incident-command backstop so the team, not any one person, carries a bad day
• Set technical direction and own the outcome.
• Guide highly skilled engineers to the best solution, mentoring rather than driving where that serves better, and tell senior stakeholders where we are going and why
• Champion build-our-own tooling and self-service, with the judgment to know where a vendor is the more economical answer
• Push AI hands-on to build observability into the stack and extend the tooling we have already built
• Grow the team and hold it accountable to the value it delivers: coach, set clear expectations, and run honest performance conversations
• Own the economics: enterprise licensing and annual true-up, storage right-sizing, and cost-to-serve.
• Track spend and defend the numbers to finance and leadership
• Set the standards for availability-group and DR design, build and automation practices, and data security and access control aligned with governance policy
• Lead modernization end to end: version migrations, cross-engine consolidation, and DR maturation, driven to measurable milestones
• Establish engineering rhythms, KPIs, and accountability, and partner across data platform, architecture, and product to deliver curated data products

Requirements

• Typically requires a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field and a minimum of 6 years of related experience; or an advanced degree with 4+ years of experience
• Typically requires 1-2 years managing and developing employees
• Deep SQL Server expertise at scale: Always On availability groups, multi-region high availability and DR, performance troubleshooting, and enterprise licensing economics
• Ability to lead engineers across multiple database technologies: relational (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Aurora), analytical (Snowflake), and non-relational or specialized stores (MongoDB, vector databases such as Pinecone). Expertise in all is not required, but you must guide direction, judge quality, and grow specialists across the estate
• Strong AWS depth running a database estate primarily on EC2, treating cloud cost as a first-class engineering concern; working Azure knowledge is useful
• A track record of defining and driving programs end to end, including migration or modernization work you initiated and owned, not just projects you were assigned
• Robust, hands-on AI ability to build observability and tooling quickly; this is critical, not optional
• Strong judgment under pressure and a bias to own the ambiguous, unowned problem rather than route it away
• Familiarity with security, compliance, and operational best practices; financial services or other regulated, high-availability experience preferred
• This position requires fluent written and oral communication in English.
• Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

Nice-to-haves

• financial services or other regulated, high-availability experience preferred

Benefits

• Hybrid Work Opportunities
• Flexible Time Off
• Career Development & Mentoring Programs
• Health & Wellness Benefits, including competitive health insurance offerings and generous paid parental leave for eligible new parents
• Community Volunteering & Company Philanthropy Programs
• Employee Peer Recognition Programs – “You Earned it”