Senior Database and Application Support Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Oversee and facilitate the availability, performance, health, and recoverability of enterprise databases and applications.

• Identify and resolve database outages, application dependencies, connection issues, service unavailability, authentication failures, resource limitations, performance declines, certificate complications, and API-related challenges.

• Investigate and troubleshoot database listeners, connection strings, connection pools, ports, drivers, service accounts, permissions, network paths, APIs, middleware, servers, cloud infrastructure, storage solutions, and security components.

• Analyze logs, monitoring data, metrics, traces, alerts, and event records to pinpoint faults and determine the source and extent of service disruptions.

• Assist with the installation, renewal, replacement, validation, and troubleshooting of certificates.

• Aid in the administration and troubleshooting of relational databases, application servers, web servers, middleware, schedulers, integration services, and background services.

• Engage in Outage Response Team activities, providing diagnosis, mitigation alternatives, workarounds, recovery actions, restoration support, and service validation.

• Maintain incident timelines and meticulously document technical findings, actions taken, decisions made, dependencies, communications, and restoration outcomes.

• Escalate complex issues and collaborate with enterprise IT teams and software development teams as needed.

• Provide logs, traces, error details, reproduction steps, configuration data, and impact assessments to development teams.

• Validate application code corrections, upgrades, releases, recovery procedures, and end-to-end transaction flows.

• Support root-cause analysis and monitor corrective and preventive measures until completion.

• Develop or implement plans for upgrades, testing steps, validation criteria, rollback procedures, and outage contingencies.

• Coordinate maintenance, patching, configuration modifications, migrations, and component replacements.

• Facilitate backup, restoration, replication, failover, failback, high availability, and disaster recovery capabilities.

• Assist with capacity, performance, availability, resource utilization, vulnerability, and security control remediation efforts.

• Maintain dependency diagrams, interface records, certificate inventories, configuration documents, recovery protocols, standard operating procedures, and troubleshooting manuals.

• Suggest enhancements to availability, resilience, performance, recoverability, security, and supportability.

⛳️ Requirements

• Active Secret clearance or higher is required.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related area.

• A minimum of 8 years of relevant experience in database support, application support, systems engineering, production operations, or enterprise IT.

• Proven experience in diagnosing issues related to database availability, application dependencies, connection failures, services, certificates, and API outages.

• Experience supporting enterprise databases and applications within a federal or Department of Defense context.

• Proficient in Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, MySQL, AWS relational database services, Azure SQL, or similar platforms.

• Familiarity with database clustering, replication, backup, restoration, failover, high availability, and disaster recovery practices.

• Experience supporting application servers, middleware, web servers, integration platforms, schedulers, and background services.

• Knowledge of Microsoft Internet Information Services, Apache, Tomcat, WebLogic, JBoss, .NET, Java, or equivalent technologies.

• Experience troubleshooting REST, SOAP, API gateway, authentication, authorization, payload, timeout, and endpoint connectivity issues.

• Experience managing or troubleshooting TLS certificates, trust stores, keystores, certificate bindings, and Public Key Infrastructure dependencies.

• Proficient in using application performance monitoring, database monitoring, logging, tracing, observability, and event management tools.

• Experience in handling production outages, incident management, service restoration, root-cause analysis, and corrective action tracking.

• Experience coordinating operational issues among infrastructure engineers, database administrators, application owners, and software development teams.

• Ability to provide logs, traces, reproduction steps, technical findings, and impact information to developers for code-level corrections.

• Experience validating component upgrades, software releases, database modifications, application fixes, and recovery procedures.

• Familiarity with applying DISA STIGs and supporting DoD RMF, ATO, IAVA, CND Directive, vulnerability remediation, and POA&M requirements.

• Experience using ServiceNow or a similar ITSM platform for incident, problem, change, configuration, and release management.

• Familiarity with PowerShell, Python, SQL, Bash, or other scripting and query languages for diagnostics and automation.

• Willingness to support after-hours outages, deployments, maintenance windows, upgrades, and recovery activities as needed.

🏝️ Benefits

• Support for after-hours work related to outages, deployments, maintenance windows, upgrades, and recovery activities as necessary.

• Option for a remote work arrangement.

• Protections under Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action policies.

• Pay transparency protections.