Senior Database Administrator

Job Description

• Must be U.S. Citizen
• Must be eligible to pass a background investigation
• Must live in the Washington D.C. Metro area (Va, Md, DC) – preferably within a 45mile radius of Ashburn, Va
• Position is “Hybrid” and requires 2 days onsite – to possibly include additional days due to mission critical needs – per need

JOB DESCRIPTION:

Seeking a highly skilled and experienced senior-level Database Administrator (DBA) to join our team. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in managing and optimizing both Oracle and NoSQL databases. Project teams utilize Oracle RDS and AWS managed databases including Postgres and DocumentDB, and MongoDB, also hosted in AWS.

This role requires a thorough understanding of the advantages of NoSQL databases such as the scalability, flexibility, and performance gains and the disadvantages compared to relational databases.

Candidate will have hands-on experience with failover and recovery, backups, migration of on-premises databases to AWS, and proficiency with AWS services. The successful candidate should be passionate about ensuring database performance, availability, and security, and experienced in debugging complex challenges and handling data warehouses.

Job Responsibilities

• Database Management: Administer, maintain, and implement permissions, policies and procedures for ensuring the secure connectivity and integrity of databases.

1. Performance Tuning: Monitor database performance, implement changes and apply new patches and versions when required to ensure optimal performance. Work closely with the application teams to optimize the application interaction with NoSQL.
2. Failover and Recovery: Design and execute database backup and recovery strategies, including failover planning and testing.
3. Migration and Upgrade: Lead migration projects from on-premises databases to AWS, relational databases to NoSQL, including planning, execution, and validation of database migrations and upgrades.
4. Security and Compliance: Ensure database security measures are in place, including access controls and audit logging. Comply with all applicable data privacy laws and regulations.
5. Data Warehousing: Manage and optimize AWS Redshift instances and other data warehousing solutions for scalable and efficient data storage and analysis.
6. Monitoring: Utilize AWS CloudWatch and other monitoring tools to ensure database health, performance, and to automate scaling and notifications.
7. Troubleshooting and Support: Provide support for complex database issues, including troubleshooting and resolving database integrity issues, performance issues, blocking and deadlocking issues, replication issues, log shipping issues, etc.

Required Skills and Experience

The ideal candidate will have the ability to handle Oracle Prod issues and carry the Oracle Duty Phone on a rotational basis. The candidate must have solid NoSQL (DocumentDB and MongoDB) skills as more and more applications are leveraging NoSQL databases. Solid experience of migrating databases from on-prem to cloud is a must.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field and at least 10 years of relevant experience.

1. Database Expertise: Proven experience as a DBA with expertise in Oracle and NoSQL databases (MongoDB).
2. AWS Managed Databases: Extensive experience with AWS DocumentDB database services.
3. Failover and Recovery: Solid experience in database failover, recovery procedures, and disaster recovery planning
4. Migration Experience: Demonstrated experience with migrating on-premises databases to AWS
5. Technical Skills: Proficient in MongoDB Query Language (MQL), database design, and data modeling. Familiarity with AWS CLI, SDKs, and CloudWatch.
6. Communication Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Desired Skills and Experience

• Certifications: AWS or relevant database certifications (e.g., Oracle Certified Professional, AWS Associate Architect).

1. Scripting Skills: Experience with scripting languages (e.g., Python, Bash) for automation of database tasks.
2. Monitoring Tools: Deep familiarity with database monitoring tools, especially AWS CloudWatch, for performance monitoring and alerting.
3. Enterprise Database Management: Experience with large enterprise database design, implementation, and optimization, for example, Oracle RDS on Exadata. Experience with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).
4. Experience with DocumentDB or MongoDB.
5. Experience with Big Query is a plus.
6. Master’s degree (or higher) in computer science or related field is a plus.