Senior Database Engineer

BetterHelp is on a mission to remove the traditional barriers to therapy and make mental health care more accessible to everyone. Founded in 2013, we are now the world’s largest online therapy service, providing affordable and convenient therapy in across the globe. Our network of over 30,000 licensed therapists has helped millions of people take ownership of their mental health and change their lives forever. And we’re not stopping there – as the unmet need for mental health services continues to grow, BetterHelp is committed to being part of the solution.

As a Senior Database Engineer at BetterHelp, you’ll join a diverse team of licensed clinicians, engineers, product pros, creatives, marketers, and business leaders who share a passion for expanding access to therapy. And as a mental health company, we take employee mental health just as seriously as we do our mission. We deeply invest in our team’s well-being and professional development, because we know that business and individual growth go hand-in-hand. At BetterHelp, you’ll carve your own path, make an immediate impact, and be challenged every day – with a supportive community behind you the whole way.

We’re looking for a Senior DBE to join our team, our first hire focused solely on database architecture and performance. This person will own the health, performance, and scalability of our databases, and play a critical role in shaping how we manage data across all environments.

You’ll be working alongside DevOps engineers, developers, and leadership to ensure our Aurora MySQL environments are highly available, performant, and ready to scale. If you live and breathe query tuning, love designing resilient schema for massive scale, and want to help teams ship fast without causing chaos, you’ll love it here.

We’re looking for someone who cares and wants to be involved in our product, mission, and success, way beyond just running queries. And of course, at BetterHelp you will enjoy true teamwork and lots of fun!

• Own the architecture, availability, and performance of our Aurora MySQL clusters.
• Design and maintain strategies for obfuscating and replicating production databases to pre-production environments at scale.
• Troubleshoot slow queries, hot tables, lock contention, and other complex performance issues.
• Work with engineers to review, improve, or rewrite inefficient queries generated by Eloquent/Laravel.
• Design schema and data modeling strategies that can evolve without risking downtime.
• Weigh in on foreign key usage and implement sane policies that balance safety with maintainability.
• Monitor and tune backup, restore, and disaster recovery processes.
• Provide guidance on Redis usage and data patterns where applicable.
• Help influence the engineering roadmap, even when it means others need to adapt workflows.
• Participate in on-call rotation for major database incidents.

• Aurora MySQL
• AWS (RDS, EC2, S3, DMS, etc.)
• Redis (Elasticache)
• Laravel / Eloquent (PHP)
• Percona / CloudWatch / Coralogix for monitoring
• Terraform (infrastructure as code)
• Bash + automation tooling

• You will NOT worry about "runway", "cash left", or "how much time we have until the next round". We have the startup DNA but we're fully backed and funded, all the way to success.
• You will NOT be confined to your "job". You will get involved in product, marketing, business strategy, and almost everything we do.
• You will NOT be bogged down by office politics, ego, or bad attitude. Only positive, pleasure-to-work-with people are allowed here!
• You will NOT get yourself burned out. We work hard but we believe in maintaining a sustainable work/life balance. Really.

Yes. We operate on PST and candidates in any time zone are welcome to apply. We ask employees to travel to our San Jose, CA office up to three times per year plus one company-wide offsite to collaborate in person and strengthen working relationships. Travel expenses are covered and reasonable accommodations are made for those under unique circumstances who cannot travel.

• 5+ years of DBA/DBE experience managing production-grade relational databases at large scale.
• Deep MySQL/Aurora internals knowledge, from slow queries to replication lag and everything in between.
• Strong experience with AWS-native database solutions and data tooling.
• Familiarity with Laravel or PHP-based ORM query behavior.
• Experience managing and monitoring databases with tens or hundreds of billions of rows.
• Pragmatic and persuasive communicator who can align teams on technical decisions.
• Strong Bash scripting and automation mindset.
• Bonus: Experience with Redis at scale.