Database Administrator

Database Administrator

Versana is seeking a Database Administrator to partner closely with our engineering and cloud infrastructure teams. In this role, you'll drive performance optimization and operational excellence across Azure-managed PostgreSQL and Oracle environments—tuning SQL and improving data access patterns in the context of our application architecture and business logic.

You should be comfortable working in modern DevOps and cloud environments using Git, CI/CD, Helm and Terraform. You will use Datadog for observability, performance monitoring, and alerting across database and application layers.

Key Responsibilities:

Core Database Administration

• Health & monitoring: Monitor database health, performance, and capacity across Azure managed PostgreSQL and Oracle using Datadog for alerting, SLO tracking, and trend analysis.
• Data protection: Own backups, restores, and disaster recovery procedures; regularly validate recovery readiness through testing.
• Governance: Administer access controls and user provisioning in alignment with security and financial compliance requirements.

Application Integration & SQL Optimization

• Application-centric tuning: Collaborate with developers to analyze and optimize SQL execution paths in the application's data access layer, using Datadog APM traces to pinpoint slow or inefficient queries in production traffic.
• Code-level analysis: Read and understand Java code to trace data access patterns and ensure tuning aligns with how the application interacts with the database.
• Proactive design partnership: Partner with software engineers and architects during design and sprint planning to shape efficient relational data models, indexing approaches, and query strategies before features ship.
• Root-cause remediation: Identify performance bottlenecks using database monitoring, then work with developers to implement query rewrites and schema adjustments that preserve application logic.
• Performance baselines: Establish and track performance baselines for business-critical queries and implement anomaly detection to prevent regression as new features are released.

Qualifications (Required):

• 5+ years of experience supporting relational databases (e.g. Postgres, Oracle).
• Hands-on experience with Git, CI/CD, Helm and Terraform for database changes, automation, and releases.
• Proficiency with Datadog (or similar observability tools) for performance monitoring and alerting across database and application layers.
• Ability to read and understand Java application code to trace data access patterns.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to partner effectively with engineering and infrastructure teams.
• Hands-on administration of Azure Database for PostgreSQL, including configuration, upgrades, and parameter tuning.
• Experience designing and operating high availability and disaster recovery (replication, failover, RPO/RTO), including regular testing.
• Strong performance tuning skills, including execution plan analysis (EXPLAIN), indexing strategy, query rewrites, and diagnosing locking/contention.
• Experience implementing database security best practices, including encryption, secrets management, role-based access, and audit logging.
• Ability to automate DBA workflows using Python, Bash, or PowerShell (maintenance, backup verification, provisioning, alerting).
• Comfort participating in an on-call rotation, leading incident triage, and writing postincident reviews with corrective and preventive actions.

Nice to have:

• Hands-on administration of Oracle Database including installation, configuration, upgrades, parameter tuning, and backups using RMAN.
• Experience with distributed databases, such as CockroachDB.
• Experience managing databases hosted on Kubernetes.

$160,000 - $180,000 a year