Programmer (Specialist)

Work Location: Remote % (Client is only interested in candidates in the Eastern and Central Time Zones)

Top Skills:
Minimum of 7 years application development, database programming, and production-support experience.
Minimum of 5 years of hands-on experience with Oracle databases, SQL, and PL/SQL.
Experience must include work with data warehouses and ETL processes.

Job Description:
Required Experience
The proposed resource must possess a minimum of seven (7) years of progressively responsible application development, database programming, and production-support experience, including at least five (5) years of hands-on experience with Oracle databases, SQL, and PL/SQL.
The resource must demonstrate senior-level experience developing, maintaining, troubleshooting, and optimizing complex database applications and data-processing solutions. Experience must include work with data warehouses, ETL processes, production data loads, performance analysis, defect correction, and data-quality validation.

Required Technical Skills
The resource must demonstrate advanced proficiency in:
Oracle relational database technologies.
PL/SQL development, including packages, procedures, functions, triggers, and complex stored program units.
Writing, analyzing, and optimizing complex SQL queries.
Oracle SQL Developer or comparable Oracle development and diagnostic tools.
Troubleshooting existing application code and identifying the underlying cause of defects.
SQL and PL/SQL performance analysis, including the ability to identify inefficient queries, execution-plan issues, indexing opportunities, and database-related performance bottlenecks.
ETL processing, data integration, data transformation, and batch data-loading operations.
Data-warehouse concepts, including dimensional data structures, source-to-target mappings, data reconciliation, and reporting dependencies.
Production support and incident investigation involving SQL, PL/SQL, ETL processes, and data-warehouse workloads.
Unit, integration, system, regression, and data-validation testing.
Source-code management, controlled deployments, and standard software-development lifecycle practices.

Required Responsibilities and Competencies
The Programmer (Specialist) must be able to:
1. Monitor and validate scheduled and ad hoc data loads, reconcile source and target results, investigate discrepancies, and resolve data-quality issues.
2. Investigate production incidents, analyze application and database behavior, identify root causes, correct defects, and verify that solutions do not introduce unintended impacts.
3. Translate business needs, operational concerns, and user-reported issues into clear technical requirements and workable solutions.
4. Review and fully understand assigned tasks, applicable requirements, dependencies, expected outcomes, and acceptance criteria before beginning development work. The resource must seek clarification when requirements are incomplete, inconsistent, or ambiguous.
5. Analyze design specifications and proposed solutions, identify technical risks or limitations, and provide constructive feedback regarding alternative designs, implementation methods, and performance considerations.
6. Develop and execute appropriate unit, integration, system, regression, and data-validation tests. Testing must confirm technical functionality, data accuracy, error handling, and compliance with defined requirements.
7. Create and maintain accurate system, program, operational, support, and user documentation.
8. Participate effectively in reviews of system designs, database designs, source code, test plans, implementation procedures, and deployment activities.
9. Assist technical and business users in understanding application functionality, warehouse data, data relationships, and reporting capabilities.
10. Manage assigned work independently, organize priorities, meet established deadlines, and coordinate effectively with other team members.
11. Identify and communicate risks, dependencies, technical concerns, and blockers promptly, including their potential effects on scope, schedule, system performance, and data quality.
12. Communicate incident status, technical findings, recommended solutions, implementation progress, and resolution details clearly to customers, stakeholders, and technical team members.

Senior-Level Expectations
As a senior resource, the Programmer (Specialist) is expected to work with limited supervision and exercise sound technical judgment. The resource must be capable of independently analyzing complex systems and data issues, determining an appropriate course of action, and carrying work through development, testing, implementation, and production validation.
The resource must also demonstrate the ability to:
Anticipate downstream effects on applications, ETL processes, warehouse data, interfaces, and reports.
Evaluate more than one potential solution and explain the benefits, risks, effort, and maintainability of each approach.
Produce reliable, maintainable, secure, and well-documented code.
Provide technically sound recommendations and respectfully challenge a proposed design when a more effective approach is available.
Collaborate effectively with developers, analysts, database administrators, business users, project managers, and support personnel.
Take ownership of assigned work and production issues through completion.
Explain complex technical matters in language appropriate for both technical and nontechnical audiences.