Database Administrator (DBA)

Database Administrator (DBA) — Job Description

Overview A Database Administrator (DBA) is responsible for designing, implementing, maintaining, and optimizing an organization’s database systems to ensure data integrity, availability, security, and performance. The DBA collaborates with developers, system administrators, and stakeholders to support applications and business processes that rely on data.

Key Responsibilities

• Database design \& architecture: design logical and physical schemas, normalize data models, and advise on data partitioning, sharding, and replication strategies.
• Installation \& configuration: install, configure, upgrade, and patch database servers and related tools (e.g., RDBMS, NoSQL, cloud-managed databases).
• Performance tuning: monitor and tune queries, indexes, execution plans, and database configuration to meet SLAs for latency and throughput.
• Backup \& recovery: implement and test backup, restore, and disaster-recovery procedures; develop RTO/RPO strategies.
• High availability \& replication: configure and maintain clustering, replication, failover, and load-balancing solutions.
• Security \& compliance: manage authentication/authorization, encryption (at-rest and in-transit), auditing, and compliance with data protection regulations.
• Capacity planning \& monitoring: forecast storage/compute needs, monitor growth, and optimize resource allocation and costs.
• Maintenance \& housekeeping: manage indexing strategies, statistics, vacuuming/cleanup, and scheduled maintenance windows.
• Incident response \& troubleshooting: diagnose and resolve database incidents, perform root-cause analysis, and implement preventive measures.
• Change management \& deployments: support schema migrations, rollouts, and rollback plans; coordinate with CI/CD pipelines and application teams.
• Documentation \& standards: maintain runbooks, run-time diagrams, operational procedures, and database standards/best practices.
• Mentoring \& knowledge sharing: train developers and other teams on efficient schema design, query patterns, and safe deployment practices.

Required Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• Experience: 3+ years (mid-level) or 6+ years (senior) working as a DBA or in a database-focused role.
• Technical skills:
• Strong SQL expertise and query optimization.
• Experience with one or more RDBMS (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle).
• Familiarity with at least one NoSQL system (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis) preferred.
• Experience with backup/restore, replication, clustering, and performance tuning.
• Knowledge of storage, networking basics, and OS-level tuning (Linux/Windows).
• Familiarity with cloud-managed databases and services (e.g., AWS RDS/Aurora, Azure SQL, Google Cloud SQL) and IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation) preferred.
• Experience with monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) and logging.
• Soft skills: problem-solving, attention to detail, good communication, ability to collaborate across teams, and incident-handling composure.

Nice-to-Have

• Certifications: e.g., Oracle Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator, AWS Database Specialty, or vendor-specific PostgreSQL/MySQL certs.
• Scripting/automation: proficiency in Python, Bash, PowerShell.
• Experience with containerized databases and Kubernetes operators for databases.
• Familiarity with data analytics, ETL pipelines, and data warehousing (e.g., Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery).

Pay: $7,354.35 – $10,302.15 per month

Benefits:

• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Salary packaging
• Unlimited annual leave

Work Location: In person