Database Administrator - Senior

Database Administrator, Senior

The Database Administrator, Senior leads the design, implementation, and lifecycle management of enterprise database platforms that underpin mission-critical systems in a highly regulated government environment. The role owns advanced performance tuning, capacity planning, and high-availability strategies to ensure resilient, scalable data services across complex application portfolios. It also establishes database standards, security baselines, and governance practices while providing technical leadership to mid-level and junior DBAs and guiding major upgrade, migration, and modernization initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain enterprise-class database solutions across platforms such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, or PostgreSQL, including advanced schema design, partitioning, and environment-specific optimization for mission-critical workloads.
• Design end-to-end performance strategies, including indexing, query optimization, plan analysis, and server-level tuning, to support large-scale transactional, reporting, and analytics workloads.
• Engineer and oversee high-availability and resilience configurations such as clustering, availability groups, replication, log shipping, or multi-region deployments, and regularly validate failover and recovery procedures.
• Define and enforce database security standards, including encryption strategies, privileged access models, auditing policies, and compliance controls appropriate for highly regulated government environments.
• Lead complex upgrade and migration initiatives, including cross-version and cross-platform moves, data consolidation, and refactoring of legacy databases to modern architectures with minimal business disruption.
• Establish and maintain enterprise backup, recovery, and disaster recovery architectures, including recovery time and recovery point objectives, and conduct regular recovery drills for mission-critical systems.
• Guide data integration, data warehousing, and ETL design efforts, including source-to-target mapping, error handling, and performance tuning for large-volume batch and near-real-time data flows.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior and mid-level DBAs, review designs and change plans, and set standards for documentation, monitoring, and incident response.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree (BA/BS) in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent relevant work experience.
• 8 or more years of progressively responsible database administration experience with primary ownership of production environments.
• Expert proficiency with relational database systems such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, or PostgreSQL, including deep knowledge of database structures, performance tuning, and troubleshooting.
• Extensive experience with database security, backup and recovery, disaster recovery planning, high-availability configurations, data warehousing, ETL processes, and data integration tools.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills with the ability to influence cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
• Active SECRET security clearance or ability to obtain and maintain clearance as required by the client.
• U.S. citizenship and willingness to travel less than 10% of the time.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience designing and operating database platforms for large, highly available environments with documented high-availability and disaster recovery patterns.
• Experience leading database modernization or cloud-migration initiatives for secured or government environments.
• Senior-level certifications or advanced concentration areas (for example, advanced Oracle DBA tracks or Microsoft Azure data platform certifications).
• Prior experience shaping enterprise database standards, patterns, and roadmaps in collaboration with architecture and cybersecurity teams.

Compensation Ranges

Compensation ranges for ASM Research positions vary depending on multiple factors; including but not limited to, location, skill set, level of education, certifications, client requirements, contract-specific affordability, government clearance and investigation level, and years of experience. The compensation displayed for this role is a general guideline based on these factors and is unique to each role. Monetary compensation is one component of ASM's overall compensation and benefits package for employees.

EEO Requirements

It is the policy of ASM that an individual's race, color, religion, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation or national origin are not and will not be considered in any personnel or management decisions. We affirm our commitment to these fundamental policies.

All recruiting, hiring, training, and promoting for all job classifications is done without regard to race, color, religion, sex, disability, or age. All decisions on employment are made to abide by the principle of equal employment.

Physical Requirements

The physical requirements described in "Knowledge, Skills and Abilities" above are representative of those which must be met by an employee to successfully perform the primary functions of this job. (For example, "light office duties' or "lifting up to 50 pounds" or "some travel" required.) Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with qualifying disabilities, who are otherwise qualified, to perform the primary functions.

Disclaimer

The preceding job description has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job.