Senior Database Administrator

Role Overview

Own the reliability, availability, performance, and security of our databases—PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MySQL—running container-native, highly available on Kubernetes. You’ll design the architecture, automate operations, guide domain teams on optimal schema & query design, and lead backup/restore and disaster recovery (DR) with clear RPO/RTO objectives.

What You’ll Do

• Architecture & HA
  

• Design and operate HA clusters on Kubernetes (StatefulSets, PDBs, anti-affinity, topology spread, CSI storage, auto-failover).
  

• Choose and operate DB operators/distributions (e.g., Zalando/Crunchy for Postgres, Percona for MongoDB/MySQL or equivalents); maintain versioning/patching strategy.
  

• Implement multi-AZ replicas, read-replicas, and connection pooling/proxying (e.g., pgBouncer/HAProxy/Envoy) for scale.
  

• Performance & Scalability
  

• Capacity planning, sizing, and benchmarking; own p95/p99 latency and throughput KPIs.
  

• Query/index tuning, VACUUM/ANALYZE/auto-analyze strategies (Postgres), sharding/replica-set tuning (MongoDB), and InnoDB/Group Replication tuning (MySQL).
  

• Data Modeling & Reviews
  

• Partner with domain teams on schema/design reviews, migration strategies (Flyway/Liquibase/Alembic), and query best practices to keep services fast and cost-efficient.
  

• Backup, DR & Compliance
  

• Own backup/restore (base backups, PITR/WAL/GTID, snapshotting), tested DR runbooks, and RPO/RTO targets; run quarterly game days.
  

• Implement data retention, encryption (at rest & in transit), auditing, and access controls (RBAC/KMS/Secrets).
  

• Automation & CI/CD
  

• Everything-as-code: Helm/Terraform/Ansible for DB infra; GitOps pipelines for changes, safe rollout/rollback, and automated smoke checks.
  

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• 5–8 years as a DBA/DBRE with production experience in PostgreSQL plus MongoDB and MySQL (at least two in depth).
  

• Strong Kubernetes fundamentals for stateful workloads (StatefulSets, PV/PVC, CSI, network policies, PDBs).
  

• Deep skills in SQL, indexing, query plans, transaction/locking, replication, and failover.
  

• Proven backup/restore & DR ownership (PITR, cross-AZ/region replicas) with documented RPO/RTO.
  

• Hands-on with automation/IaC (Helm/Terraform/Ansible) and CI/CD for DB changes.
  

• Observability in practice (exporters, dashboards, SLOs, alerting) and rigorous incident management.
  

• Excellent collaboration/communication; confident running schema/design reviews with product teams.
  

Preferred (Nice to Have)

• Experience with pgBouncer, Patroni/Crunchy/Zalando operators (Postgres), Percona Operators (MongoDB/MySQL).
  

• CDC and streaming (Debezium/Kafka/Pulsar), read-through caches (Redis), and read/write splitting.
  

• Security hardening: TLS/mTLS, TDE/column encryption, secrets mgmt (KMS), auditing.
  

• Compliance exposure (PII, GDPR/DPDP), data masking/tokenization.
  

• Scripting (Python/Bash) for automation; chaos/testing tools for DR and failover.
  

• Multi-tenancy patterns (schema vs. DB vs. cluster) and cost attribution.
  

Example Projects

• Migrate a monolithic DB to read-replicas + connection pooling with safe cutover and zero-downtime.
  

• Stand up operator-managed Postgres with PITR and scheduled verification restores.
  

• Design a MongoDB replica set or MySQL Group Replication topology with multi-AZ resilience and automated failover.
  

• Implement Debezium→(Kafka/Pulsar) for CDC to downstream analytics with backpressure and replay.