monday.com renames DBAs DBREs as database fleet grows

monday.com renamed its database administrators DBREs after its stack grew from a single database into a fleet of hundreds. The company says the new title, DataBase Reliability Engineer, fits a job built around automation, self-service, availability, performance and monitoring rather than classic reactive database administration.

The shift tracks the way the work itself changed. monday.com launched in 2014 with a monolith application and one database, then crossed 100,000 customers in 2020. As usage climbed, the platform added read replicas, split reads from writes, and eventually moved into a world of hundreds of microservices and hundreds of databases. At that point, the company said, the old DBA model no longer scaled.

That matters inside monday.com because the databases sit under the product experience customers use to run work. The company says every database hiccup can affect customers’ ability to interact with their boards, so the reliability role is tied directly to product uptime, not just backend housekeeping. The team’s job now includes keeping stateful systems healthy across a growing estate, where a database cannot simply be swapped out the way a stateless Kubernetes node can.

monday.com’s own infrastructure posts show why the title changed. The company moved from a single-region AWS deployment to a multi-region architecture for performance, resiliency and compliance, while also relying on services such as RDS, Redis, SQS and S3. That architecture pushes database work farther from manual server care and closer to engineering design, where capacity planning, change management and observability have to be built into the system.

The change also fits monday.com’s earlier operating style. In 2018, the company said it had around 30 engineers, more than 70 dashboards in the office and 20 to 30 deployments a day, with all engineers sharing a 24-hour on-call rotation. That culture of broad ownership helped set the stage for DBRE, where reliability is treated as part of engineering, not a separate cleanup function.

The database fleet is still growing. monday.com says it now has over 200 relational databases, including read replicas, plus some NoSQL databases, and its newer data work includes mondayDB 3, which moves from a MySQL fleet to a specialized columnar database engine. For hiring and team design, the message is blunt: as the platform scales, database work at monday.com looks less like a maintenance job and more like an engineering discipline built to keep the product fast, resilient and easy for developers to ship against.