Senior Database Administrator

Skills & Experience Requirements:

Core PostgreSQL Experience:

● 6+ years as a primary PostgreSQL DBA in production at scale; deep understanding of

MVCC, isolation levels, locking, WAL, and vacuum/autovacuum tuning.

● Proven ownership of performance, availability, and data integrity in mission-critical

systems.

● Comfortable leading incident response and authoring post-incident reviews.

AWS and Cloud Operations (RDS/Aurora):

● Hands-on experience with Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and/or Amazon Aurora

PostgreSQL in Multi-AZ, including provisioning, parameter groups, engine upgrades,

maintenance windows, and credential rotation.

● Design and operation of read replicas and Aurora reader endpoints for scale-out reads,

along with safe failover and promotion procedures.

● Experience running blue-green database cutovers using RDS Blue/Green Deployments

or replica-promotion patterns, with a solid understanding of replication lag and cutover

planning.

● Use of RDS Proxy and/or PgBouncer for connection pooling, including safe workload

isolation and transaction timeouts.

● Operational familiarity with Performance Insights, Enhanced Monitoring, and

CloudWatch metrics and alarms for PostgreSQL.

Performance and Query Tuning:

● Expertise with EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) and turning query plans into concrete

fixes such as index changes, SQL rewrites, and materialized summaries.

● Strong indexing practice (B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN) and practical partitioning strategies

for large append-only tables such as jobs or events.

● Hands-on experience with REINDEX CONCURRENTLY, vacuum tuning, and bloat

management.

● History of eliminating N+1 and hotspot patterns and driving down p95 and p99 latency

under load.

Schema Design and Online Migrations:

● Solid relational modeling skills with pragmatic normalization and clear thinking around

JSONB trade-offs for semi-structured data.

● Experience running zero- or low-downtime schema changes using expand, backfill, flip,

and contract patterns, backed by migration tooling such as Flyway, Liquibase, or Prisma

Migrate.

● Idempotent change management and a strong understanding of how to maintain data

correctness in the presence of concurrent writers.

Backups, Disaster Recovery, and Data Safety:

● Configuration and operation of automated backups and Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR),

with routine restore validation and clear RPO/RTO documentation.

● Snapshot strategies and cross-Region snapshot copy for disaster recovery, and where

appropriate the use of Aurora Global Database or cross-Region replicas.

● Runbooks and rehearsals for failover and restore procedures.

Security:

● Encryption at rest using AWS KMS and encryption in transit using TLS, combined with

secure VPC and subnet group design and well-maintained security groups.

● Secrets management using AWS Secrets Manager or Systems Manager Parameter Store,

including rotation of database credentials and application secrets.

● Role-based access control and least-privilege design within PostgreSQL itself, and

careful handling of user data to avoid sensitive data in logs.

Observability and Automation:

● Baseline and ongoing analysis using pg_stat views, query latency SLOs, and database

health dashboards built on CloudWatch, Performance Insights, or third-party tools such

as Datadog or New Relic.

● Automation skills in SQL and Bash and at least one high-level language such as Python,

used for checks, reporting, and data hygiene tasks.

● Experience with Infrastructure as Code (for example Terraform or CloudFormation)

and CI/CD hooks that validate migrations and run database smoke tests.

Ecosystem and Integration Awareness:

● Practical experience with Amazon ElastiCache for Redis for caching and rate limiting

and with Amazon SQS or similar queueing systems to keep heavy work off request

paths.

● Comfort collaborating with application teams that use ORMs and frameworks such as

Prisma, TypeORM, SQLAlchemy, or similar, and understanding how those patterns affect

database load.

Communication:

● Excellent written and spoken English; able to produce clear runbooks, design

documents, and incident reports.

● Proactive partner to Backend, SRE, and Security teams, and able to mentor engineers in

query hygiene and safe release patterns.

Availability:

● Willing to participate in an on-call rotation and support planned after-hours changes

during critical launches.