At least five years of experience as a manager supporting database or storage teams. Demonstrable people management experience: coaching, performance evaluation, mentorship, and career development. Relevant project management experience: prioritization, tracking schedules and deadlines, communicating across team/org boundaries. Experience managing process design: running a smooth on call rotation, incident response, postmortems, load testing, capacity planning. Hiring experience: predicting staffing needs, designing interview loops, evaluating candidates, assisting with closing candidates at offer stage. Proven track record of running mission-critical databases in production (replication, backups, migrations, HA/DR). Skilled with Kubernetes and container orchestration (experience running DB workloads in K8s is a bonus). Experience working in Cloud (preferably GCP) or Data Center infrastructure.