Senior Database Administrator

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

📋 Description

• Manage production databases on AWS, which includes RDS and Aurora for PostgreSQL and MySQL, as well as self-hosted MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server on virtual machines as required.

• Oversee DynamoDB, ElastiCache (Redis), and OpenSearch to support application workloads and caching functionalities.

• Take ownership of database architecture, performance optimization, capacity planning, and appropriate sizing.

• Supervise backup, restore, snapshot, and point-in-time recovery strategies.

• Validate Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) through scheduled restore and failover tests.

• Design, test, and uphold high-availability and disaster recovery solutions, including Multi-AZ, cross-region replication, and well-documented failover procedures.

• Establish and maintain Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for database availability, latency, replication lag, and query performance.

• Monitor and fine-tune database performance utilizing Dynatrace, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry.

• Lead responses to production incidents, including troubleshooting, service restoration, root-cause analysis, and post-incident corrective actions.

• Oversee database upgrades, patching, configuration changes, maintenance, and technology refreshes.

• Enhance database resilience through capacity planning, performance testing, failure-mode analysis, disaster recovery, and recovery testing.

• Identify and mitigate reliability risks and technical debt by utilizing reliability metrics, incident trends, capacity data, and service health indicators.

• Automate database operations through an everything-as-code approach.

• Collaborate with Platform Engineering and application teams to establish operational requirements, enhance reusable infrastructure, and bolster database reliability and operability.

⛳️ Requirements

• Must be a U.S. Citizen.

• Ability to obtain and maintain the required Public Trust level clearance.

• Bachelor’s degree with 8 years of experience, a Master’s degree with 6 years of experience, or a High School Diploma or equivalent with 12 years of experience.

• Over 5 years of experience in database administration, data platform engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) with substantial production database ownership.

• Hands-on experience with operating database services on AWS at scale in a production environment.

• Compliance with DoD 8570/8140 certification requirements.

• Proven experience in backup, recovery, and disaster recovery execution, including validated restore testing.

• Demonstrated experience in defining and implementing SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for data services.

• Established incident management experience, including on-call ownership and root-cause analysis.

• Excellent problem-solving abilities and strong communication skills, capable of presenting performance and reliability insights to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Knowledge of AWS data services and core services, including RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, KMS, Secrets Manager, and CloudWatch.

• Experience in relational database administration with PostgreSQL and MySQL; Oracle or SQL Server experience is a plus.

• Proficiency in advanced SQL, query optimization, execution plan analysis, and index and schema design.

• Expertise in high availability, replication, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery design and testing.

• Familiarity with Dynatrace, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry.

• Experience with Terraform and Ansible / Ansible Tower.

• Proficient with GitLab, Jenkins, and Liquibase or Flyway.

• Knowledge of Sonatype Nexus and Aqua Security.

• Programming skills in Python, Bash, or Go.

• Administration experience with RHEL Linux.

• Familiarity with Windows Server.

🏝️ Benefits

• Overtime eligibility may be applicable.

• Shift differential may be applicable.

• A discretionary bonus may be available.