The Senior Database Administrator is responsible for the design, implementation, optimization, and support of Experity's cloud-native database platforms, focusing primarily on Aurora PostgreSQL and MySQL running on AWS RDS.
This role plays a critical part in ensuring high availability, performance, scalability, and security of mission-critical SaaS databases. The DBA partners closely with Engineering, DevOps, and Infrastructure teams to operate a highly observable, resilient, and cost-efficient data platform.
This role is expected to act as a technical leader in database reliability and performance, influencing architecture decisions, mentoring team members, and driving operational excellence across multiple database platforms.
Responsibilities:
- Deploy, configure, and manage PostgreSQL and MySQL databases in AWS RDS and Aurora environments.
- Configure and manage MySQL parameter groups, option groups, automated backups, snapshots, and maintenance windows.
- Architect and support high availability solutions leveraging clusters, read replicas, Multi-AZ deployments, writer/reader endpoint strategies and read scaling.
- Monitor and mitigate replication lag across replicas to ensure read consistency and performance.
- Tune and manage database-specific parameters.
- Optimize workloads for Aurora storage architecture, including I/O patterns, autovacuum behavior, and checkpoint tuning.
- Optimize database indexing, query execution plans, and MySQL InnoDB configuration for production workloads
- Monitor and troubleshoot database performance using AWS CloudWatch, DataDog, and Database-native tools (e.g., pg_stat_statements, EXPLAIN).
- Analyze and optimize query performance, indexing strategies, and resource utilization.
- Investigate and resolve complex production issues, including locking, blocking, replication lag, and connection saturation.
- Implement and manage backup and recovery strategies including point-in-time recovery (PITR), automated snapshots, and cross-region resilience.
- Partner with engineering teams to improve schema design, query patterns, and database access efficiency.
- Drive observability best practices, including alerting, logging, and performance metrics across database environments.
- Optimize cloud database cost and performance, including instance sizing, storage utilization, and workload tuning.
- Support and contribute to database migrations and modernization efforts.
- Automate database provisioning and operations using Infrastructure-as-Code and scripting.
- Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement processes.
- Support MySQL version upgrades, patching, and database migrations with minimal downtime.
- Other duties as assigned.
Education:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
Experience:
- Minimum 5 years of database administration experience, with 3+ years focused on PostgreSQL in high-volume OLTP production environments.
- 2+ years administering MySQL in production, preferably on AWS RDS.
- Strong hands-on experience with AWS Aurora PostgreSQL and AWS RDS MySQL.
- Deep understanding of PostgreSQL internals, including query planner, indexing, vacuuming, WAL, and replication.
- Strong understanding of MySQL architecture, including InnoDB storage engine, replication, indexing, and query optimization.
- Proven expertise in database performance tuning and troubleshooting in high-availability, high-throughput environments.
- Experience supporting systems with significant transaction volume (e.g., 100-200+ TPS) and scaling for continued growth.
- Experience troubleshooting contention scenarios, including locking, blocking, connection saturation, and long-running transactions.
- Experience with AWS services including RDS, Aurora, EC2, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch, and S3.
- Experience with monitoring and observability platforms such as DataDog and CloudWatch.
- Experience designing and supporting High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions.
- Strong understanding of relational database design and data modeling.
- Experience with automation (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar) and scripting (Python, Bash, etc.).
- Experience operating in a production SaaS or high-transaction environment.
Team Member Competencies:
- Demonstrates ownership and accountability for production systems.
- Strong problem-solving skills with a proactive approach to identifying and resolving issues.
- Ability to work cross-functionally with engineering and operations teams.
- Communicates clearly and effectively in both technical and non-technical contexts.
- Continuously seeks to improve processes, performance, and reliability.
Equal Opportunity Employer
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