Database Administrator

Database Administrator

Required Skills & Experience• 3–6 years of hands-on database administration experience in production environments. • Hands-on experience with Amazon Aurora (MySQL- or PostgreSQL-compatible), including cluster configuration, read replicas, and Aurora-specific performance characteristics. • Strong working knowledge of MySQL or MariaDB — configuration, replication, backup and recovery, and upgrades. • Demonstrated query and index tuning ability; comfortable reading execution plans and diagnosing performance problems independently. • Solid SQL skills and a working understanding of relational data modeling. • Experience with managed cloud databases (AWS RDS, Azure SQL, or equivalent). • Scripting ability for automation (Python, Bash, or similar). • Familiarity with backup, disaster recovery, and high-availability concepts, and experience actually exercising them — not just documenting them. • Clear written communication and the judgment to escalate appropriately during incidents.

Nice to Have Skills & Experience• Participation in a real database migration — ideally on-premises or self-managed to a managed cloud service — including cutover planning and rollback. • Experience with AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) or comparable replication and migration tooling. • Microsoft SQL Server administration; our reporting and audit-compliance systems run on SQL Server and Azure. • Working knowledge of AWS cost and capacity management for database workloads. • Exposure to PHP-based application stacks, or comfort working closely with engineers on one. • Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, CloudFormation) and CI/CD familiarity.

Job DescriptionOur Revenue Compliance platforms process tax, business license, and property tax data for government agencies across the country. The databases behind those platforms are the system of record — when they are slow, unavailable, or wrong, our customers cannot collect revenue. We are hiring a Database Administrator to own the day-to-day health of those databases and to play a hands-on role in our upcoming migration to Amazon Aurora. This is a build-and-run role: you will spend part of your time on migration work — assessment, schema and data movement, cutover rehearsal — and part of it on the operational fundamentals of backups, performance, capacity, and security. You will be one of a small number of database specialists in the organization, working alongside software engineering, site reliability, and data engineering. There is real ownership here and a direct line from your work to platform stability.

What You'll Do • Own database operations. Administer production and non-production MySQL/MariaDB environments — backups and restores, replication, patching, upgrades, capacity planning, and monitoring. • Support the Aurora migration. Contribute to assessment, schema and data migration, replication and cutover planning, validation, and rollback procedures. Help establish operating practices for the target environment. • Tune for performance. Profile slow queries, analyze execution plans, design and maintain indexing strategies, and partner with application engineers to resolve performance problems at the source rather than masking them. • Protect the data. Maintain and regularly test backup and recovery procedures. Own recovery objectives and be able to prove they are met. • Enforce security and compliance. Manage access controls, credentials, encryption at rest and in transit, and audit requirements for systems handling sensitive government and taxpayer data. • Automate routine work. Replace manual database operations with scripted, repeatable, version-controlled processes. • Partner with engineering. Review schema changes and migrations before they ship. Advise on data modeling, query design, and the database implications of new features. • Respond to incidents. Participate in on-call rotation for database-related incidents; lead root cause analysis and drive durable fixes.