Jobs › COUNTRY Financial

Senior Database Reliability Engineer

COUNTRY Financial · Bloomington, IL · $94,400–$129,800 a year · Full time

Posted Sep 1, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Oct 6, 2026

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Likely interview questions for this role

Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.

About your past

Tell me about a time you pushed back on a request from an application team because it would hurt reliability.

What they are checking: Whether they protect the platform while still helping the team find a workable path.

What would you do

You are paged at 2 a.m. because a database is out of disk space. What do you do first, and what do you do the next day?

What they are checking: Whether they stabilize fast and then fix the root cause so it does not repeat.

How would you plan for moving some database workloads to the cloud?

What they are checking: Whether they weigh cost, performance, licensing and migration risk instead of moving everything at once.

About the work

Which database platforms have you supported at scale, and what was the hardest reliability problem you solved?

What they are checking: Whether they have real depth in enterprise databases and how they reason through hard outages.

Walk me through how you would design high availability and disaster recovery for a critical claims database.

What they are checking: Whether they understand replication, failover, RPO and RTO and match the design to business needs.

A query that ran in two seconds now takes two minutes. How do you troubleshoot it?

What they are checking: Whether they check execution plans, statistics, indexes and blocking in a logical order.

How have you used automation to give application teams self-service database tasks?

What they are checking: Whether they can reduce tickets and toil with safe, automated workflows.

How do you approach patching databases without unplanned downtime?

What they are checking: Whether they plan rolling patches, testing and rollback steps.

How do you decide what to monitor and alert on for a database platform?

What they are checking: Whether they focus on signals that show user impact and avoid alert fatigue.

How do you handle security for databases holding sensitive financial and personal data?

What they are checking: Whether they think about encryption, access control, auditing and least privilege.

Practice this interview out loud.

Offer builds a real interview for this exact role at COUNTRY Financial from your resume and this job description, asks the questions one at a time, and tells you what landed. The first one is free.

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The full job description

As published by COUNTRY Financial.

Experience more with a career at COUNTRY Financial! We’re excited you’re interested in a career at COUNTRY as we strive toward our vision - to enrich lives in the communities we serve. Our footprint spans coast to coast. But more important than where we operate, is the people who do the work. Apply today to help our organization grow and make a difference for our clients. About the role As a Database Reliability Engineer on our database engineering team, you’ll ensure the availability and reliability of the enterprise database platforms. You’ll also partner with other infrastructure engineers to maintain and deploy database solutions while also working closely with business users to provide automation and self-service opportunities. How does this role make an impact? - Design, build, implement, and support COUNTRY’s IT solutions. - Ensure IT solutions meet requirements for security, availability, capacity, resiliency, and performance in a way that is efficient and supportable, reducing overall support costs. - Understand industry leading solutions and trends for assigned technologies and applying those as appropriate for COUNTRY. - Understand business needs and partnering with appropriate IT counterparts to recommend technology solutions. - Establish and maintain an IT multi-year strategy with a focus on continuous improvement. Create and maintain solutions architecture artifacts and other strategy and system documentation. Do you have what we're looking for? • Typically requires 5+ years of experience in database information technology or a combination of related experience, education and training. • Experience developing automation solutions using PowerShell, C#, Python, or other scripting languages to streamline administration, monitoring, and operational processes. • Experience with Microsoft Azure services, including Azure SQL, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, Azure Monitor, Azure Automation, and related cloud platform capabilities. • Experience designing, implementing, and supporting high availability, disaster recovery, backup, and resiliency solutions in Microsoft Azure, including cloud-native services and recovery strategies. • Experience implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices using tools such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, ARM/Bicep, Terraform, or similar platforms. • Experience diagnosing and resolving complex SQL Server performance and availability issues using Query Store, execution plans, Dynamic Management Views (DMVs), Extended Events, wait statistics, indexing strategies, and workload analysis. • Experience implementing and supporting Microsoft Entra ID and database security solutions, including managed identities, role-based access control (RBAC), encryption, auditing, Key Vault integration, vulnerability management, private networking, and least-privilege access models. • Experience evaluating and optimizing database platform capacity, performance, and cost efficiency, including compute utilization, storage growth, service tier selection, scaling strategies, reservations, elastic pools, and serverless architectures. #LI-CORP #LI-Hybrid Base Pay Range: $94,400-$129,800 The base pay range represents the typical range of potential salary offers for candidates hired. Factors used to determine your actual salary include your specific skills, qualifications and experience. Incentive Pay: In addition to base salary, this position is eligible for a Short-Term Incentive plan. Why work with us? Our employees and representatives serve nearly one million households with our diverse range of personal and business insurance products as well as retirement and investment services. We build relationships and work together to create a stronger, more secure future for our clients and our communities. We’re a big company, yet small enough you can make an impact and won’t get lost in the shuffle. You’ll have the opportunity to learn and grow throughout your career, either within this role or by exploring other areas of our business. You’ll be able to take advantage of our benefits package, which includes insurance benefits (medical, dental, vision, disability, and life), 401(k) with company match. COUNTRY Financial is committed to providing equal opportunity in all areas of employment, and in providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, veteran status, national origin, disability, or any other status protected by applicable laws or regulations. Come join our team at COUNTRY today!

Apply at COUNTRY Financial