Senior Database Administrator

Primary job role

The primary job role of a Senior Database Administrator (DBA) includes overseeing the management, maintenance, and optimization of databases within the organization. Works on strategic initiatives to align the database infrastructure with long-term business goals and ensures that best practices in database management are consistently followed.

Main duties/responsibilities

• Optimize database queries to ensure fast and efficient data retrieval, particularly for complex or high-volume operations.
• Design and implement effective indexing strategies to reduce query execution times and improve overall database performance.
• Monitor and profile slow or inefficient queries and recommend best practices for rewriting or re-architecting queries.
• Continuously analyze execution plans for SQL queries to identify bottlenecks and optimize them.
• Database Maintenance: Schedule and execute regular maintenance tasks, including backups, consistency checks, and index rebuilding.
• Health Monitoring: Implement automated monitoring systems to track database performance, availability, and critical parameters such as CPU usage, memory, disk I/O, and replication status.
• Proactive Issue Resolution: Diagnose and resolve database issues (e.g., locking, deadlocks, data corruption) proactively, before they impact users or operations.
• High Availability: Implement and manage database clustering, replication, and failover strategies to ensure high availability and disaster recovery (e.g., using tools like SQL Server Always On, Oracle RAC, MySQL Group Replication).
• Capacity Planning: Monitor resource consumption and plan for growth to ensure the database can scale effectively with increasing data volume and transaction load.
• Resource Optimization: Analyze and optimize resource usage (CPU, memory, disk, network) to reduce operational costs.
• Licensing Management: Ensure that database licensing models are properly adhered to and identify opportunities for reducing licensing costs.
• Cloud Cost Management: Use cost analysis tools (e.g., AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management) to monitor and optimize cloud database spend, identifying opportunities for right sizing or reserving instances.

Experience

• 5 to 7 years of experience in Microsoft SQL Server administration

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering or a related field
• Microsoft SQL certifications (MTA Database, MCSA: SQL Server, MCSE: Data Management and Analytics) will be an advantage.