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
This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.
