Database Admin Expert

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Illinois.

📋 Description

• Design, develop, deploy, manage, and support enterprise PostgreSQL environments across both production and non-production landscapes.

• Lead the installation, configuration, patching, upgrades, migrations, and lifecycle management of PostgreSQL.

• Establish and uphold PostgreSQL engineering standards, reference architectures, build procedures, operational controls, and best practices.

• Engage in architecture reviews and provide guidance to application teams on database design, scalability, resilience, and operational readiness.

• Create and support high-availability PostgreSQL solutions utilizing Patroni, etcd, HAProxy, Keepalived, and streaming replication.

• Develop and maintain disaster-recovery strategies across various sites or regions.

• Plan and execute failover, switchover, recovery, and resiliency testing.

• Define, validate, and maintain recovery time and recovery point objectives in collaboration with stakeholders.

• Design, implement, and manage PostgreSQL backup and recovery solutions.

• Oversee pgBackRest, WAL archiving, point-in-time recovery, retention, and recovery validation processes.

• Conduct restore testing and assist in disaster-recovery exercises.

• Monitor database availability, capacity, health, and performance.

• Analyze and enhance SQL queries, indexes, execution plans, database configurations, and workloads.

• Resolve complex production incidents, lead root-cause analysis, and implement preventive measures.

• Propel database reliability, observability, capacity planning, and operational excellence initiatives.

• Enforce database security controls, access-management standards, and least-privilege practices.

• Manage roles, privileges, authentication, encryption, auditing, and credential-management integrations.

• Support compliance reviews, vulnerability remediation, security assessments, and evidence requests.

• Develop automation for database provisioning, configuration, deployment, patching, validation, and routine operations.

• Utilize Infrastructure as Code, configuration management, source control, and CI/CD practices.

• Collaborate with engineering teams to enhance safe self-service capabilities and minimize manual operational efforts.

• Support mission-critical production and non-production PostgreSQL environments.

• Participate in on-call rotations, major incident responses, change management, and problem management.

• Create and maintain runbooks, troubleshooting guides, standards, and operational documentation.

• Mentor engineers, review technical solutions, and offer technical leadership for PostgreSQL initiatives.

⛳️ Requirements

• 7+ years of hands-on PostgreSQL administration experience supporting mission-critical production environments for Lead level (highly desired).

• 10+ years of database administration experience for Expert level.

• 8+ years of hands-on PostgreSQL administration experience supporting mission-critical production environments for Expert level.

• Strong Linux administration experience; RHEL or a comparable enterprise Linux distribution is preferred.

• Profound understanding of PostgreSQL architecture, internals, configuration, security, maintenance, and performance tuning.

• Practical experience with PostgreSQL streaming replication, high availability, disaster recovery, backup and recovery, point-in-time recovery, WAL management, and capacity planning.

• Strong skills in SQL, execution-plan analysis, indexing, and query optimization.

• Proven capability to troubleshoot complex database, operating system, storage, and connectivity issues in production environments.

• Experience in planning and executing database upgrades, migrations, patching, and production changes.

• Familiarity with Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL or Percona-supported PostgreSQL environments is preferred.

• Practical experience with Patroni, etcd, HAProxy, Keepalived, pgBackRest, and PostgreSQL-native monitoring and diagnostic tools is preferred.

• Experience with cloud database and infrastructure platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud Platform is preferred.

• Familiarity with observability platforms such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or Percona Monitoring and Management is preferred.

• Experience with automation and delivery tools such as Ansible, Terraform, GitHub, GitLab, or CI/CD pipelines is preferred.

• Exposure to other database technologies like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB, or Neo4j is preferred.

• Experience leading technical initiatives, mentoring team members, and influencing platform standards is preferred.

• Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders and work efficiently across organizational boundaries.

• Successful completion of a background investigation.

• Reliable internet connection with minimum speeds of 50 MB download and 5 MB upload.

• Dedicated, private workspace free from distractions, with appropriate desk and seating.

• Allstate generally does not sponsor individuals for employment-based visas for this position.

🏝️ Benefits

• Comprehensive technology setup, including a laptop, monitors, headset, keyboard, and mouse.

• Monthly connectivity reimbursement to help offset internet costs for employees eligible to work from home.