What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Systems Engineer position at Kanor Systems?
Role: Senior Systems Engineer
Location: Bethesda ,MD (Hybrid)
Experience : 5- 10 Years
Summary :
Client is seeking a Senior Manager, Platform Engineer, to join our Database Platform team. This role is an experienced individual contributor who combines strong software engineering skills with genuine database expertise and a platform engineering orientation. The engineer contributes to designing, automating, and operating production-scale database platforms that are secure-by-default, resilient-by-design, and easy for application teams to consume. Working closely with Site Reliability Engineering, Networking, Security, and Application Engineering teams, this role delivers database capabilities through Marriott's Internal Developer Platform - enabling self-service provisioning and a consistent developer experience across Couchbase Capella, AWS Aurora, AWS DocumentDB, and AWS ElastiCache. Success in this role requires the ability to navigate complexity, work collaboratively across teams, and consistently deliver outcomes with a degree of independence within a scoped area.
Required
- Bachelor's degree in engineering or computer science discipline and/or equivalent professional experience
- 7 years of combined software engineering and/or infrastructure engineering experience, including hands-on experience with at least one distributed or document-oriented database technology (e.g., Couchbase, MongoDB, Cassandra, DocumentDB, or Cosmos DB)
- Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (particularly Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure (preferably AWS), with proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming or scripting language (Python, Go, or equivalent)
Preferred
- Experience with Couchbase Server or Couchbase Capella, and/or AWS managed database services (Aurora, DocumentDB, ElastiCache)
- Experience with event-driven systems, workflow orchestration frameworks, database schema/change management tools (e.g., Liquibase), or compliance automation and policy-as-code tooling
- Prior involvement in large-scale database migrations in production environments, or backend software development experience (Java, Node.js, Python, or equivalent
CORE WORK ACTIVITIES
- Contribute to the design and build of database infrastructure provisioning modules and automation pipelines, encoding platform standards for security, availability, and cost
- Implement CI/CD automation to standardize and safely deliver database platform changes across environments
- Enable self-service database capabilities that allow application teams to execute routine operations independently through Marriott's Internal Developer Platform
- Build platform tooling that gives application teams visibility into their database health, security posture, and compliance standing
- Support strategic database migrations - including planning, production cutovers, and post-migration validation - in close cooperation with SRE and application teams
- Contribute to the development of migration patterns and standards that can be executed consistently at scale
- Develop guidance artifacts and prescriptive documentation for supported database platforms
- Participate in working sessions with application teams on database architecture, performance, and operational readiness
- Partner with application teams to identify and close compliance gaps against platform standards
- Support the design and maintenance of automated disaster recovery capabilities for production database platforms
- Partner with SRE teams on monitoring, alerting, reliability, incident management, and post-incident analysis
- Ensure database platforms are secure-by-default and aligned with enterprise security and compliance standards
- Integrate database services with IAM controls, networking, and configuration management systems
- Contribute to technical discussions, shared documentation, engineering standards, and patterns
- Collaborate with product owners and leadership on roadmap inputs and technical prioritization